END OF A SENSATIONAL CASE IN AMERICA.
A telegram to the New York Herald from Frankfort, Kentucky, states that the Governor of the State has pardoned Caleb Powers, the ex-Secretary of State, and Jas. Howard, for alleged complicity in the assassination of the late William Goebel, Governor-elect, eight years ago.
The release of Powers and Howard ends one of the most remarkable criminal cases ever fought in the American criminal courts. Powers was tried Jour times for the murder of Mr Goebel, being sentenced to death the first time, and to life imprisonment after the aecond and third trials. The jury failed to agree in the last trial. In 1900 Mr Goebel was nominated for Governor by the Democratic party in Kentucky, in opposition to the Republican Governor, who was a candidate for re-elec-tion.
Both political parties claimed that their candidate had been elected. The Republican candidate, being in possession of the capitol, refused to leave it, and he lived in the building, surrounded by “loyal” militiamen and mountaineers.
Mr Goebel set up a rival State government in the Capitol Hotel a few hundred yards away. One morning, soon after he issued his proclamation as Governor, Mr Goebel was shot and mortally wounded as he crossed the park near the hotel. His friends claim that the shot was fired from a window in the Secretary of State’s office in the capitol, where Caleb Powers was entrenched. After Mr Goebel’s death, the Democratic Ifieutenant-Governor, Mr Cripps Beckham, assumed office, and the courts finally decided that the Democrats were legally entitled to the governorship. Powers was arrested, as well as James Howard, a noted rifle shot, who was in the copitol at the time Mr Goebel was assassinated. Mr Goebel’s friends, who included the most powerful politicians In Kentucky, made every effort to have the two men sent to the scaffold, and they nearly succeeded. '
The present governor of Kentucky, who has pardoned Powers and Howard, is a Republican.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/MH19080827.2.23
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Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 429, 27 August 1908, Page 4
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327END OF A SENSATIONAL CASE IN AMERICA. Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 429, 27 August 1908, Page 4
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