In re Storti
| Citation | 60 N.E. 210,178 Mass. 549 |
| Parties | In re STORTI. |
| Decision Date | 07 May 1901 |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Case reserved from supreme judicial court, Suffolk county; William Caleb Loring, Judge.
One Storti was convicted of murder, and he brings error, filing therewith a petition for habeas corpus. Affirmed, and writ denied.
W. M. Stockbridge and C. W. Rowley, for petitioner.
F. H. Nash, Asst. Atty. Gen., for the Commonwealth.
These proceedings are respectively a writ of error and a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Both are intended to raise the same issue, that the punishment, death by electricity, to which the said Storti has been sentenced, under St. 1898, c. 326, § 6, is ‘cruel or unusual’ within article 26 of the Massachusetts declaration of rights. Upon the writ of error, the plaintiff in error insisting that the assignment was of error in fact, evidence was heard, the plaintiff in error being brought into court by habeas corpus to be present at the hearing, and the presiding justice found that the assignment was not true. The independent petition for habeas corpus was reserved by agreement of parties for hearing by the full court at the same time with the writ of error.
In the view which we take of the case it is unnecessary to consider any question of procedure, either as between the two proceedings adopted or as to matters of detail arising under each. We therefore pass all such matters on one side. It also is unnecessary to consider whether the before mentioned article of our declaration of rights is to be limited in its application to the action of magistrates so far as they are left to themselves and the common law, or whether it is to be taken to embody a large general principle equally binding upon all branches of the government, or at least binding upon magistrates and courts of law even when the legislature has undertaken to establish a punishment by its act. Finally, it is unnecessary to go into any nice argument upon the words of the article, and to decide whether, inasmuch as those words are ‘cruel or unusual,’ not ‘cruel and unusual,’ a punishment which is unusual, but is not cruel, is forbidden by them.
Taking all the preliminaries most favorably for the prisoner, we are clearly of opinion that the constitution is not contravened by the act, and we render our opinion at once that we may avoid delaying the course of the law and raising false hopes in his mind. The answer to the whole argument which has been presented is that there is but a single punishment, death. It is not contended that if this is true the statute is invalid, but it is said that it is not true, and that you cannot separate the means from the end in considering what the punishment is, any more when the means is a current of electricity than when it is a slow fire. We should have thought that the distinction was plain. In the latter case the means is adopted not solely for the purpose of accomplishing the end of death but for the purpose of causing other pain to the person...
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