HAUPTMANN CASE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 25, Issue 3766, 8 June 1936, Page 3

HAUPTMANN CASE

REACTION SETS IN. CRIME AND POLITICS. SILENT TO THE GRAVE. New York, April 5. What has come to be known in the newspapers as the Hauptmann “farce” has ended with his execution. Just as the world shuddered when the first victim of electrocution struggled for half an hour, so the world again shudders at the torture, lasting for fourteen months, to which the unfortunate German carpenter was submitted since he was sentenced to death. Teh minutes before the time finally fixed for his execution, he vVas advised that he had three more days to live. Half an hour after the time again fixed for his electrocution, the sentence was carried out.

Hauptmann disappointed the tabloids and moral newspapers. He bore up through the terrible ordeal, made no confession, spoke no word as he went to his death, and, beyond a scornful stare at the half a hundred reporters, gave no sign that would whet their appetite for sensationalism. There was not even a struggle. “I wish it were possible to convey to you the supreme experience of those last hours I spent with Hauptmann,” wrote his spiritual adviser to the Governor of New Jersey. “They were indescribable. The crackling of electric sparks, as the current was being tested, the rustle of executioners, the raucous gibes of the minions, whetting their appetites for their feast of human blood, broke in upon this man, bowed in prayer, his hands clasped in mine, pouring out his heart and soul in the agony of an unjust sacrifice.” Mockery of Justice.” Hauptmann would never have been sentenced to death in a British country. There was no evidence that he had ever seen the Lindbergh baby, whom he was charged with murdering. He was found guilty, in a trial that was a mockery of justice, with cameras, motion pictures, and news reels flashing in the court room—found guilty on the evidence of “Doctor” Condon that he recognised his voice as that of the man to whom he spoke in hushed tones in the dark, with a high cemetery wall separating them. On the day before the execution, one of a series of articles by Condon, in the most sensational of the American weeklies, had a screaming headline, “Condon accepts challenge from condemned cell.” In these articles, which would have been held in contempt in a British court, Condon told more, far more, about the case than he disclosed in his evidence. When the question was raised as to his being called to substantiate his statements, he disappeared on a cruise of the Caribbean.

Countless thousands of Americans will recoil with horror from the memory of the last month, during which the case was reopened with a confession of a disbarred lawyer, which he later repudiated, saying he had been tortured with lighted cigarette ends before he made it. It was asserted that he had been offered a million dollars to make the confession, on a promise that he would never be found guilty. A convict was released from prison in Chicago on his promise to produce a substantial portion of the Lindbergh ransom notes. [Political Judiciary.

During that month politics intervened. There were two sets of investigators, the Republican group trying to save Hauptmann, the Democratic group determined that he would be executed. One recalls that when Hauptmann was arrested in September, 1934, the United States Attorney-General, the highest law officer in the Union, who might be called on to advise the President on a plea of clemency, went before a newsreel and stated: “We have arrested the right man; this man is guilty!” The wife of President Roosevelt, in a radio address, declared that the trial was a travesty of justice. The reaction is now being heard. There is a growing body of public opinion, led by senior mmbers of the Bar, to have justice divorced from politics. But the politicians will triumph. The pickings and patronage are too rich to surrender lightly. The system, under which every criminal that faces a Judge is a prospective voter for him, will be sustained, as it purveys, as well, to the scavengers of the Press, to which now are added the horrors of radio, which finds news a very profitable field for commercial advertising. One who is accustomed to British justice cannot help feeling sympathetic towards those in this country that believe that here is another case of a man who has been butchered to make ar American holiday.