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Show INNOCENT AND GRATEFUL. A few days ago an Italian, Raffaele Cascone, was seen walking barefoot through the crowded streets of New York. He was performing a pilgrimage pil-grimage of gratitude to the holy Virgin, because he had escaped the electric chair. The poor foreigner was indicted for murder several years ago, on June 9, 1903. He has spent thirty three months in the. death-house in Sing Sing, lie saw seventeen men taken out for execution. exe-cution. His conviction was reversed by the court of appeals and a new trial, which lasted seven weeks, resulted in an acquittal. He was declared innocent, after years of suffering and aeonv. "Raffaele Cascone," the New York World remarks, re-marks, "is of course unaware that all of our machinery ma-chinery of justice moves with the greatest deliberation deliber-ation under the weight of technicalities. Any lawyer law-yer would have told him that our tribunals are years behindhand in their calendars; that the chances chan-ces are in favor of a miscarriage of justice owing to death, removal or loss of memory on the part of witnesses; that criminal and civil proceedings are every day settled in a manner unsatisfactorv to both sides, who prefer dicker to delay; that hundreds hun-dreds of individuals wait trial in our city nrisons: that offenses are constantly condoned because the injured party will not submit to repeated and unnecessary un-necessary forced appearances. Raffaele Cascone might not know what you referred to if you mentioned men-tioned the Bastile. Nor is he ware that some of the nations of Continental Europe for instance, Germany and Norway are willing to indemnify a man who has been unjustly accused, while in France is is provided that a decision declaring the accused ac-cused to be innocent must be posted in the town where he resides and published in the official journal jour-nal and, if requested, in five other newspapers." No. he may not know this, but he is nevertheless thankful to heaven for having escaped execution for a crime which the courts declare he did not commit, and he does not, probably, even realize the keen sarcasm of his pilgrimage in bare feet upon the pavements of the great city of New York. It should not be possible in this country to keen an innocent man incarcerated for years and then turn, him loose without an apolo. without some, compensation. com-pensation. There should be some redress for that class of wrongs. Every man should have a right to a speedy as well as an impartial trial. Deseret News. |