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TRIAL OE JOI4N W. WEBSTER.
359
Excellency and the Honorable Council will find sufficient grounds for
granting to me a pardon, and of restoring to them the husband and
father,-for which I most respectfully and humbly pray.
Boston, April 24, 1850.
[Withdrawn on application of Dr. Webster, June 4, 1850.]
A fortnight after the decision of the Court upon the application for
a writ of error, at a meeting of the Governor and Council held on the
2d of July, 1850, a second petition of the prisoner for a commutation
of sentence was received, of which the following is a copy:-
To His Excellency the Governor, and to the Honorable Executive Coun-
cil of the State of Massachusetts:
John White Webster, a convict under sentence of death in Boston
jail, in behalf of himself and of his wife and his children, respectfully
petitions, that the sentence awarded against him by the law may be
commuted to such other less horrible and ignominious punishment as
your honorable body may mercifully decree.
Your petitioner fully admits that he was tried before a fair and
impartial tribunal, and that under the law, as it exists, his jury, composed
as it was of honorable and high-minded men, could have returned no ver-
dict other than they did. But he respectfully reminds your honorable
body, that the two great moral ingredients of the crime of murder, malice,
and premeditation, have never been found against him by a jury, but
have been necessarily inferred by the arbitrary rules of the law from cer-
tain general facts which your petitioner will not deny, but the extenuat-
ing details of which no man, in your petitioner's situation, can ever pos-
sess legal evidence to prove. These details your petitioner has confided to
the friend who presents his petition, with authority to state them to
your honorable body, in the hope that you will find therein reason to
extend to your petitioner and his family that mercy of which the law
has made you the dispensers.
Boston, June, 1850.
This petition was forthwith referred to the Committee on Pardons,
of which the Hon. John Reed, Lieutenant Governor, was Chairman; and
at the request of the Rev. George Putnam, S. T. D., who desired to be
heard in support of the petition, twelve o'clock of the same day was
assigned for the hearing.
At the hour named, the Committee met in the ante-chamber, and the
Rev. Dr. Putnam appeared, and, having read the petition, proceeded to
make the following
J. W. WEBSTER.
J. W. WEBSTER.
PRELIMINARY REMARKS.
The grounds which I am authorized to take in aid of the petition of
J. W. Webster, and which I take, not as an advocate pledged to a side,
but in good faith as expressing my own personal belief, are as follows:
That the human remains found in the Medical College in November
last were those of the late George Parkman, and that he came to his
death by the hands of Dr. Webster, in a moment of passion, under great
provocation; that there was no premeditation nor murderous intent;
that there was a homicide, but not a murder; or, if it could be called a
murder, under the rigid interpretation of the rules of common law pre-
vailing in this Commonwealth, yet that it was not murder, according to
the moral judgments of our people or of mankind; not the crime to
which the public sense of justice awards the punishment of death, or
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