MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 726, 17 March 1876, Page 3

MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE.

A man wan recently pardoned from tho Charleston (Mass.) State i’rison, after serving almost eight years of a life sentence, for a crime which ho never committed, This was Moses B, Wheeler, convicted of arson in February, 1860, on the testimony of his sister and her husband, who said they saw him fire, a house in Brighton, occupied by a widow, ami against his own oath and tho testimony of the widow herself who declared that Wheeler saved her house from burning, the actual damage tho building sustained being 30 dots. Two years after Wheeler’s entrance upon his life imprisonment, the sister who had condemned him to it died of small-pox. On the day before her death she confessed to another sister, in an agony of remorse, that she had perjured herself at that trial at tho bidding of others, and for the purpose of getting her brother out of the way. Before a legal deposition could be obtained, she was too far gone to give it. The motive for this unnatural conduct was at the outset explained by Wheeler to bo that he was charged by a brother who had died in battle by his side, to see that their mother had his property, and when he returned home, he found it claimed by his sister on the strength of a forged letter purporting to be from the dead brother. Be tho motive what it may, she and her husband had actually put him out of the way by perjury. Wheeler has made incessant efforts since to have his sentenced revoked, and at last succeeds. It is a consideration that might well give pause to the zealous advocates of capital punishment, that this discovery of innocence is liable to be paralleled after a man is hanged.