--------------------------------------------------- Susanna Cox and the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania Why it's time to finish the task of abolition --------------------------------------------------- The hanging of Susanna Cox, a young servant of Pennsylvania German heritage sentenced to death at age 24 for the infanticide of her newborn child, took place on June 10, 1809, 206 years ago this Wednesday. Her story continues to be a part of Pennsylvania German tradition and folklore 206 years later, with her execution reenacted annually at the Kutztown Folk Festival. While her tragedy has many dimensions, a critically important response is the one that Governor Simon Snyder, also of Pennsylvania German heritage, tried his best to make a reality in 1809: the need to abolish the death penalty in Pennsylvania. Whether innocent or guilty, Susanna Cox died in good part because of the flaws of the capital punishment system then in place. By considering a few of these flaws, we can appreciate the wisdom of current Governor Wolf, Governor Snyder's worthy successor, in calling a moratorium on executions and inviting Pennsylvania to consider its root values which could have and should have led to total abolition of the death penalty two centuries ago -- and should do so now. ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. The Tragedy of Susanna Cox: Could she have been innocent? ------------------------------------------------------------ On February 17, 1809, Jacob Geehr set out for a washhouse on his property in Oley Township, Berks County, to find iron for some repairs. There he found a piece of iron -- but also, wrapped in a piece of a man's coat, the frozen body of an infant, which he then placed back where he had found it, and notified the authorities. Young Susanna Cox, the family's longtime servant, confessed that the dead child was hers, and explained that he had been stillborn. At the time, the injuries observed on the male infant's body -- including a torn tongue and broken or dislocated jaw, and also a piece of tow (i.e. hemp) found in the child's mouth -- were taken as evidence of foul play, with Susanna herself assumed to be the killer. Pre-trial publicity made an intentional infanticide the widely accepted narrative, and one which a jury soon accepted also, finding her guilty of the one crime which since 1794 had been subject to execution in Pennsylvania: murder in the first degree. After the Governor declined to grant clemency, despite his personal opposition to capital punishment (see Section 4 below), Susanna was hanged on June 10 in Reading. Shortly before her execution, she confessed to killing her infant, having previously insisted on her innocence. As was common in that era, she stood with the rope around her neck on a cart which was then drawn away, with her execution then requiring 17 minutes as a large crowd witnessed her final struggles. For a usual narrative assuming Susanna's guilt as charged, see Louis Richards, _Susanna Cox: Her Crime and its Expiation_, an account in 1900 urging that "it would be doing violence to impartial judgment" to assert that the jury's capital verdict "was not fairly warranted under the law and the facts."[1] In their recent book on the case, Patricia Suter, Russell Earnest, and Corrine Earnest argue that Susanna's initial account that the child was born dead may have been true, or at least closer to the truth than the jury's finding of deliberate murder.[2] They point to the evidently clumsy handling of the frozen infant's body by the Geehr family members, and then by not-so-expert authorities, as one possible source for the observed injuries taken to prove murder. Also, they suggest, the child might have suffered fatal injuries during the process of labor (e.g. strangulation by a misplaced umbilical cord); or even at the moment of birth itself, from falling onto a hard surface before the laboring mother could break the fall. Dr. John Bodo Otto testified that, when he examined the body, the child "appeared" to have been born alive, but that he could not be positive.[3] Even if Susanna Cox gave birth to and then killed a live infant, her case raises some basic problems with the death penalty in 1809 that still, in other forms, haunt Pennsylvania's system today. Abolishing the death penalty, as Governor Snyder himself urged in that year and later during his time in office, is right way to open a new page of history. ---------------------------------------------------------- 2. Punishing infanticide: A cruel and unnecessary sentence ---------------------------------------------------------- Ironically, Susanna Cox may have been hanged in part because the Pennsylvania Legislative in 1794 adopted a landmark reform which was a bridge not quite far enough. In 1793, members of a State Senate committee expressed their "doubts at present, whether the terrible punishment of death be in any case justifiable and necessary in Pennsylvania," a view shared by Justice William Bradford of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.[4] However, Bradford favored abolition in two steps: immediately ending the death penalty for all crimes except "deliberate assassination," to be defined as the new offense of murder in the first degree; and then consideration in due course of abolition for even that crime. He urged that "until we have had more experience, it is safest to tread with caution on such delicate ground, and to proceed step by step in so great a work. A few years experience is often of more worth than all the theory and rhetoric in the world."[5] This led to the compromise of April 22, 1794, which reserved the death penalty for murder in the first degree, defined as a "wilful, deliberate and premeditated killing"; or a killing perpetrated in the course of "any arson, rape, robbery, or burglary." Less aggravated murders, those of the second degree, would be punished by a prison term at hard labor of between 5 and 18 years.[6] In arriving at this scheme, the Legislature made an additional compromise which would prove fatal in the case of Susanna Cox. Under the English law, the concealment of the birth of any illegitimate child found dead raised a presumption of murder by its mother. By the time Bradford issued his report of 1793, there was in Pennsylvania the mitigating requirement of "some proof that the child was born alive" before the presumption of murder would arise.[7] However, Bradford held this modest change far less than adequate: "But does it necessarily follow, that a child, which is born alive, must be destroyed merely because its death is concealed? May not the child perish from want of care, or of skill, in so critical a moment? A helpless woman, in a situation so novel and so alarming -- alone, and, perhaps, exhausted by her sufferings -- may she not be the involuntary case of her infant's death? and, if she afterwards consults a natural impulse to conceal her shame, is not the penalty beyond the demerit of the offence?"[8] One solution he suggested might have treated infanticide as a separate crime from other forms of murder: "In Denmark, women guilty of child-murder are no longer punished with death: but are condemned to work in spin-houses for life, and to be whipped annually, on the day when, and the spot where, the crime was committed. This mode of punishment, mr. Howard assures us, is dreaded more than death; and, since it has been adopted, has greatly prevented the frequency of the crime."[9] In England, likewise, the Infanticide Act of 1922, adopted at a time when death was still the mandatory penalty for any common law murder, served to abolish this penalty for the mother who deliberately killed her child shortly after giving birth. Women's policy networks, associated with feminism and the suffrage movement, played a central role in this humane legislation.[10] The Pennsylvania Legislature, however, settled on a different solution borrowed from New Hampshire which Bradford had recommended "while this offence remains capital." Concealment of an illegitimate birth followed by the infant's death was made an offense subjecting the mother to imprisonment for up to five years. Such concealment would no longer raise any conclusive presumption of murder by the mother; rather, the prosecution must prove "that she did wilfully and maliciously destroy and take away the life of such child." The prosecution had the discretion to bring either or both of these charges; and the jury, to acquit or convict on one or both.[11] The premise both of Bradford's report in 1793, and of the 1794 legislation, was that the death penalty "ought never to be inflicted, where it is not absolutely necessary to the public safety."[12] Sadly, that standard would not apply to the punishment of Susanna Cox. -------------------------------------- 3. Aggravation creep: Death by degrees -------------------------------------- Assuming that she had intentionally killed her newborn infant, Susanna Cox might still have had her life saved by the innovation for which Pennsylvania's 1794 reform law is still most famous: degrees of murder. The purpose of this new device, as explained by Bradford, was to reserve execution (until it was totally abolished) for the single crime of "deliberate assassination." This type of calculated killing seemed at once especially aggravated; and also most likely (or least unlikely) to be subject to possible considerations of deterrence, since someone perpetrating a crime in cold blood might be more apt to consider the consequences. The statute thus defines murder in the first degree as "all murder, which shall be perpetrated by means of poison, or by lying in wait, or by any other kind of wilful, deliberate and premeditated killing." As originally proposed by Bradford, this was a complete definition.[13] One of Bradford's purposes was to punish a coldblooded killing in the course of a felony such as robbery or burglary, to prevent the victim from becoming a witness, with a penalty "widely different from that of any other crime" -- not necessarily death, he adds, but designed "to impress a respect for life" and deter the killing of witnesses.[14] Somewhere in the subsequent legislative process of 1793-4, however, language was added to make first-degree, and therefore capital, any murder "which shall be committed in the perpetration or attempt to perpetrate any arson, rape, robbery, or burglary,"[15] including unpremeditated or even accidental killings. Bradford's language, in contrast, would have treated such cases as murder in the second degree, subject to a prison term rather than execution.[16] This legislative change was not in itself relevant to the case of Susanna Cox, who was charged with the premeditated killing of her newborn infant rather than a killing the course of one of the specified felonies, but it did illustrate a more general temptation raised by capital statutes which would touch on her case. That trend is "aggravation creep," the tendency for categories defining an aggravated or capital murder to grow wider, or to be interpreted by the courts in a wider sense than they may have been originally intended. Thus, following the passage of the reform act, Pennsylvania judges in the period of 1794-1807 interpreted the statute to mean that if a "design" or "intention" to kill had formed at any time before the fatal act, then the crime was murder in the first degree, and subject to the mandatory death penalty.[17] In 1862, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court summarized what it saw as the prevailing view as holding that "the true criterion of the first degree is the intent to take life."[18] This watering down of Bradford's "deliberate assassination" to a mere requirement for an intent to kill may have made a critical difference for Susanna Cox, given the jury's conclusion that she did intentionally kill her newborn child. Having just endured the throes of birth alone, did she really act, beyond a reasonable doubt, with the quantum of calculation typical of poisoners or killers who lie in wait for their victims? If the jury had answered in the negative, then Susanna Cox would have been convicted of murder in the second degree, and sentenced at the discretion of the trial judge to a term somewhere in the range of 5 to 18 years. Whatever the ultimate truth as to her guilt or innocence, the sentence would have better fit the infanticide of which she was convicted. ----------------------------------------------------------- 4. Governor Snyder's Dilemma: Let her hang, or set her free ----------------------------------------------------------- Given our modern experience of clemency decisions where a Governor commutes a death sentence to some form of life imprisonment, often life without parole (LWOP), we may find it hard at first to comprehend the situation which evidently prevailed in Pennsylvania both before and for some decades after the 1794 reform. In that era, the power to pardon a prisoner condemned to death did not evidently include, as we would expect, the power also to reduce or commute a death sentence to any other penalty, such as life imprisonment. Rather, it was an all or nothing choice: either let the death sentence be carried out, or else grant a pardon -- meaning an outright release from all further punishment. Since some writings about Susanna Cox do assume that Governor Snyder had discretion to commute her sentence to imprisonment[19], I would like to document two cases which indicate the contrary, with the caution that some legislators, at least in 1835, did take a broader view of the Governor's pardon power as including an option for commutation. Justice Bradford, in order to illustrate the tendency of criminals to jump at any chance to escape without punishment, even at the risk of their lives, cites the case of two felons, one of them identifiable as Jacob Dryer (or Drier). After the earlier Pennsylvania reform act of 1786 passed, replacing the death penalty with hard labor as a punishment for such crimes as robbery or burglary, prisoners already condemned to hang for these crimes had the option of being resentenced under the new law and saving their lives. However, as examples of how criminals may act with "the most fatal rashness," Bradford tells how two prisoners, one convicted of burglary and the other of robbery, "obstinately refused to pray the benefit of the act, and submitted to the sentence of death in expectation of a pardon." One, Jacob Dryer, was pardoned -- but the other was refused clemency and soon led to execution.[20] This stratagem would make sense only if the Supreme Executive Council (then exercising the pardoning power later assigned to the Governor) lacked the power of doing the obvious thing and commuting both death sentences to the terms of labor provided by the 1786 act. Rather, the Supreme Executive Council was left with the choice of either granting outright freedom or letting the capital sentences be executed -- and, faced with this choice, it granted clemency to one prisoner, Dryer, but permitted the other to hang. Another case illustrating this apparent lack of commutation power on the power of the Governor is that of Joseph Blundin of Bucks County, condemned for murder in the first degree in 1834. There was no question of guilt, but the Legislature was urged to intervene by "a large number" of citizens "of highest respectability" because "he was not in a sound state of mind" at the time of the murder of Aaron Cuttlehow. The killing had resulted from the escalation of a quarrel arising from overly rough play while "cradling" (i.e. scything) oats. Intoxicants had been in use, although Blundin's drunkenness had not been satisfactorily proven.[21] In December 1834, the Pennsylvania House of Representatives debated a petition which proposed that the Legislature itself commute Blundin's death sentence to life imprisonment; but was taken to invite the alternative course of either "a general act, authorizing the Governor in all cases of capital convictions, to commute if he thinks proper"; or, most simply, abolishing the death penalty in Pennsylvania and replacing it with life imprisonment. The last alternative would afford the Legislature the well-precedented option, exercised in the reform acts of 1786 and 1794 alike, to reduce existing death sentences to the punishment for the same offense provided by the new statute.[22] In this debate, there was widespread agreement that for the Legislature itself to intervene and alter the punishment in any specific criminal case would raise serious constitutional as well as practical problems. However, some legislators rejecting this solution nevertheless argued for the abolition of the death penalty, or for an act granting the power of commutation to the Governor, with the second alternative sometimes seen as a step toward the first. A Representative T. S. Smith put the case as it might apply not only to Joseph Blundin, but also to Susanna Cox: "There are cases now in existence, where convictions have taken place of murder of the first degree, and the subsequent discovery of testimony has made it manifest, that the culprit has been convicted of too high a crime.... If the mind is suffered to dwell on the condition of such a [person], and the justice of the distinction in the law be at the same time acknowledged, it must be sensible of the cruelty of taking away a life which the law designed to spare."[23] Representative Smith's next sentence seems all to relevant to current administration of the death penalty in the U.S.A. also, followed by an explanation of why the Governor of Pennylvania should have the power to commute: "The contemplation of the death of one man, for the same crime for which another is punished by imprisonment, is revolting to a sense of justice. But to him who is sentenced there is no relief but through the executive, and there is no choice given to the executive, but to put to death or pardon. The criminal must either be punished beyond the design of the laws, or be let loose upon a society, a blood stained culprit."[24] A Governor's power to commute, however, would resolve this dilemma: "Some gentlemen have thought that stained and crimsoned as he is, it would be better to pardon him, than to put it in the power or any tribunal or any individual to commute the punishment. But they lose sight of the justice due to the community. They would suffer the criminal to escape, rather than that the Governor should sometimes err in discharging the murderer from a just penalty. That is the whole extent of the danger. The merciful maxim, that it is better that ninety and nine guilty persons should escape, than that the innocent should suffer, forbids the adoption of so severe an alternative. The plan proposed suffers neither the guilty to escape, nor those unjustly condemned to suffer. It does justice to the individual, and protects the community, by confining for life, him, whose hands are stained with human sacrifice."[25] These remarks are in keeping with a historian's remark that the power of the Governor to commute a death sentence to life imprisonment, as two members of Blundin's jury also urged, "was doubted at that time. The Governor respited Blundin three times, the last of which expired on Friday, August 14, 1835."[26] On that day, Blundin was hanged, over a year after the fatal altercation of July 27, 1834. Susanna Cox was the last woman to be publicly executed in Pennsylvania, while Joseph Blundin was one of the first to be executed privately within the precincts of a jail, following a statute of 1834 enacted to end the spectacle of hangings as public gatherings. Abolishing the death penalty would have much better achieved this goal. ----------------------------------- 5. Arbitrary factors: A moral panic ----------------------------------- A final factor that may have deterred Governor Snyder from the outright pardon that appears to have been his only option for stopping the hanging was another case of infanticide reported just as he was considering Susanna Cox's fate: "The particular crime of which Susanna Cox had been convicted was no uncommon offence, and it was especially ill fated for her cause before the Governor that, in the beginning of May, 1809, while a petition in her behalf was still in his hands, a girl named Mary Meloy was arrested upon the like charge at Lancaster, then the seat of the State government. The circumstances were of unusual atrocity, and whilst the defendant was subsequently acquitted, she was at the time of her apprehension believed to be guilty."[27] As in later times, the perception of a crime wave -- here, of infanticide -- would favor a mood of severity and strict enforcement. Releasing a woman who had been convicted of murdering her child, where the physical evidence was then and for many decades taken to be conclusive of the infant's violent death, would have been an especially difficult decision for the Governor, despite his desire to abolish the death penalty on which he moved forward legislatively later that same year. At some level, the paradoxical or even self-contradictory logic of the legislative compromise of 1794 may have encouraged this kind of severity. It was a commonplace of the 18th-century reformers that punishments should be both mild and consistently enforced, with little need for pardons. This logic led in 1793 to total abolition of the death penalty, which some legislators wanted to implement or at least seriously consider promptly, but with Bradford preferring a more gradualistic approach to this same goal. However, in seeking to make the best case for retaining the death penalty for aggravated murder -- the new crime of murder in the first degree -- Bradford argued that this interim measure might have a deterrent value: "We have had no experience what its effect will be, when it is applied to a single crime, of such a nature as to exclude the hopes of pardon."[28] Here "exclude the hopes of pardon" was a critical requirement, given Bradford's observation (Section 4 above) of how two felons spurned the sure reduction of their death sentences to terms of labor offered by the reform act of 1786, daring the Governor in effect either to turn them loose or to let them hang. As Bradford also realized, the success of such a no-pardon policy depended on a level of public support which he was well aware might well already be undergoing erosion even for the crime of murder: "If we seek a punishment capable of impressing a strong and lasting terror, we shall find it in an execution rarely occurring -- solemnly conducted -- and inflicted in a case, where the feelings of mankind acquiesce in its justice, and do not revolt at its severity."[29] By 1793, such a revolt was already underway, as reflected by the doubts on the part of some Senators as to whether death was necessary for any crime, as well the claims of Benjamin Rush in 1788: "Humanity, revolting at the idea of the severity and certainty of a capital punishment, often steps in, and collects such evidence in favour of a murderer, as screens him from justice altogether, or palliates his crime into manslaughter."[30] Bradford, whom Rush had helped persuade to take the cause of total abolition seriously, was very likely alluding to this passage. If total abolition had followed the 1794 act after "a few years experience," then this paradox might have been swiftly resolved. The execution of Susanna Cox in 1809 heightened it, and likewise the execution of Joseph Blundin in 1835. The latter was justified by a certain Representative Reed, at least unless and until the law itself were changed, with this grim logic: "It may be a bloody law that brings this prisoner to his doom, but it will be a far bloodier law that alters or annuls it now. It may be a bloody and a barbarous law, but _it is the law_. It is the law this prisoner is adjudged to have violated -- it is the law which has hurried to a grave of infamy many a guilty man before him. It is the law which till repealed we believe to be to our security -- and, as the law, we ask that it may be sacred and inviolate."[31] Governor Snyder in 1809 might have been influenced against his one available option of an outright pardon for Susanna Cox by the fresh report of another case of infanticide, suggesting what is known as a moral panic, here a perceived threat that mothers were killing their children at an alarming rate, so that this crime needed to be discouraged as forcefully as possible. In 1834-1835, both the Legislature's inertia in not abolishing the death penalty and so resolving the case of Joseph Blundin in a constitutionally unquestionable way, and the lack of any accepted commutation power for the Governor, placed the letter of a law, originally intended by many of its supporters as a steppingstone to total abolition, above either its spirit or the public sentiment for proportionality and mercy. However, Representative Reed's grim logic may point to the most important moral of the Susanna Cox story also: death penalty laws do harm "till repealed." --------------------------------------------------------- 7. Susanna Cox's Lesson: The time for abolition has come! --------------------------------------------------------- After a delay of 221 years since the great reform legislation of 1794, and 206 years after the tragedy of Susanna Cox, it is time for the Keystone State to fulfill William Bradford's intention that "the Legislature of Pennsylvania, putting the key-stone to the arch, may triumph in the completion of their benevolent work." The time has come to abolish the death penalty whose injustices are revealed by her real-life story, and enter a new era of swift, certain, and consistent criminal justice. ----- Notes ----- 1. Louis Richards, Esq., _Susanna Cox: Her Crime and its Expiation. A Paper Read Before the Historical Society of Berks County, Pa., March 13, 1900. (E. F. Owen and Co., 1901), p. 7; available at . The text is available at . For another account based on local traditions, see Kimberly Brown (Director of Special Collections and Archives for the Berks History Center), "Susanna Cox" , July 28, 2012. 2. Patricia Suter, with Russell Earnest and Corrine Earnest (Foreword by John Yoder), _The Hanging of Susanna Cox: The True Story of Pennsylvania's Most Notorious Infanticide and the Legend That's Kept it Alive_ (Stackpole Books, 2010). Much of the discussion about possible innocence is in Chapter 9, "Ten O'Clock to Two O'Clock and Fifty Minutes," which analyzes the testimony presented at Cox's trial. 3. See id., Chapter 9 (Kindle version, locations 799-816), for some scenarios at or around the time of birth that could account for the child's observed injuries. The authors observe, for example, that the U.S.A. in 1809 -- especially for a poor servant woman like Susanna Cox going through labor without support from a doctor or midwife -- presented conditions like those prevailing today in "developing nations." They note that a recent study "found that nineteen percent" of infant deaths under such conditions "are caused by injuries sustained during birth. The study found this number could be significantly reduced simply with the presence of an attendant." Id. (Kindle version, locations 802-805). 4. William Bradford, Esq., "An enquiry, how far the Punishment of Death is necessary in Pennsylvania" [26 February 1793], in _The American Museum: or, Annual Register of Fugitive Pieces, Ancient and Modern for the Year 1798_ (1799), pp. 5-39, at p. 39, n. at * (quoting Pennsylvania Senate resolves of February 22, 1793). Available at . 5. Id., p. 33. 6. Pennsylvania Statutes, 1794, Chapter MDCCLXXVII [1777], "An Act for the better preventing of crimes, and for abolishing the punishment of death in certain cases" (April 22, 1794), Sections II, IV. , 7. Bradford, "An Enquiry" (n. 4 above), p. 34. 8. Id., p. 35. 9. Id. 10. See ; and D. J. Grey, "Women's policy networks and the Infanticide Act 1922" 20 Century Br Hist. 2010;21(4):441-63 . 11. Compare Bradford, "An Enquiry" (n. 4 above), p. 35; and Pennsylvania Statutes, 1794, Chapter MDCCLXXVII (n. 6 above), Section XVII. 12. Pennsylvania Statutes, 1794, Chapter MDCCLXXVII, id., in opening paragraph which serves as a preamble to the Act. Bradford, id., pp. 6-8, regards the death penalty, if not "absolutely necessary," as unconstitutionally "cruel"; thus, he finds that "to take away like, in such case, seems an unauthorised act of power." Id. at 8. For more on this doctrine of "absolute necessity" in the Founding Era of 1765-1800, see my paper "Back to the Future with the Eighth Amendment: Today's Death Penalty and Founding Era Standards of Decency" (June 3, 2015) . 13. Compare Bradford, id., p. 39, n. at * (quoting Pennsylvania Senate resolves of February 22, 1793), with Pennsylvania Statutes, 1794, Chapter MDCCLXXVII, id., Section II. 14. Bradford, id. at p. 33. 15. Pennsylvania Statutes, 1794, Chapter MDCCLXXVII (n. 6 above), Sections II, IV. 16. Bradford (n. 4 above), p. 34, more generally questions what has become known as the felony-murder rule, where "homicide, accidentally happening in consequence of a felonious or unlawful act" is treated as murder (or as manslaughter if the unlawful act is a misdemeanor, the misdemeanor-manslaughter rule). He cites one reform proposal in Virginia: "That, in future, no such case shall be deemed man-slaughter, unless man-slaughter were intended, nor murder, unless murder were intended." A fine point of distinction between the 1793 draft, id. at 39, n. at *, and the 1794 statute, id., Section IV, is that the former would have punished murder in the second degree with a term of imprisonment "for any time not exceeding twenty-one years," while the latter specified a term of "not less than five years, nor more than eighteen years." 17. For a helpful summary of these cases see Edwin R. Keedy, "History of the Pennsylvania Statute Creating Degrees of Murder," 97 _University of Pennsylvania Law Review_ (No. 6, May 1949), 759-777 at 773-775. Keedy also notes some opinions requiring a higher level of premeditation or "a wicked, settled purpose," treating the statutory circumstances or poisoning or lying in wait as illustrative. Id. at 775, and n. 109, quoting _Kelly v. Commonwealth_. 1 Grant 484. 491 (Pa. 1858). 18. Keedy, id. at 774 and nn. 107, 108, quoting _Keenan v. Commonwealth_, 44 Pa. 55. 56 (1862). From the standpoint of a stricter concept of premeditation, Suter et. al., _The Hanging of Susanna Cox_ (n. 2 above), Chapter 9, argue: "A premeditated murder is characterized by purpose, previous consideration and some degree of planning... Based on the evidence presented, premeditation does not neatly describe events that unfolded on that fateful day." (Kindle version, locations 815-817.) 19. See, e.g., Suter et. al., id. at Chapter 12, "Seduced by the Devil," reporting that by May 15, 1809, "Susanna Cox received word that Governor Snyder would not commute her death sentence" (Kindle version, locations 975-977). 20. Bradford, "An Enquiry" (n. 4 above), p. 10 and n. at *. On Jacob Dryer's case, see Jennifer Manion, _Women's Crime and Prison Reform in Early Pennsylvania, 1786-1829_ (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008), p. 25. "Jacob Dryer, convicted shortly after the law was passed, requested that he be handled under the old law and hung rather than imprisoned and set to labor in the streets. Many believe that he was hedging his bets on a complete pardon." This was Bradford's view. . 21. For a brief account of Joseph Blundin's crime and case, see J. H. Battle, ed., _A History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania_ (A. Warner and Co., 1887), pp. 276, 279, available at . For the debate in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, see Samuel Hazard, ed., _Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania_ (Vol. XV, January-June 1835), (Wm. F. Geddes), Vol. XV, No. 1 (January 3, 1835), p. 8 (Report of the Committee on the Judiciary System regarding petition for Joseph Blundin) and pp. 9-12 (debate on "Case of Joseph Blundin," House of Representatives, December 18, 1834). Available at . 22. Thus see _Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania_, id., at p. 10, speech of Representative Laycock: "[I]f either a general or a special law were passed by the legislature which would go to abolish capital punishment, it would then become necessary to make provision for such as had been found guilty of offences under a former law. He believed that the Legislature possessed such powers, and that they were strictly in accordance with the views of the Legislature of 1794, by whom the penal code of Pennsylvania was reformed and modified, and who, by an act passed at that session, gave those sentenced to death under former laws, a right to choose between the punishments inflicted by the old or the new laws." 23. Id. at 11. 24. Id. 25. Id. 26. J. H. Battle, ed., _A History of Bucks County_ (n. 21 above), p. 276. 27, Louis Richards, _Susanna Cox_ (n. 1 above), p. 9. 28. Bradford, "An Enquiry," (n. 4 above), p. 32. 29. Id., pp. 32-33. 30. Benjamin Rush, "An enquiry into the justice and policy of punishing murder by death," 4 _The American Museum: or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces_ 78-82 at 79 (1788). Available at . 31. _Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania_ (n. 21 above), p. 9. Margo Schulter June 8, 2015