The Daily Sentinel

A Murderer Set Free

It looks very much, indeed, as if the state of New York is to be charged with a very grave miscarriage of justice within its borders in the acquittal of Thornton Hains for murder. We know, perhaps, that a great many people will disagree with us in our judgment of the matter: but, nevertheless, we regard his discharge from custody and his acquittal as nothing more nor less than a betrayal of justice.

Whatever provocation Captain Hains had for killing William E. Annis, it did not contemplate the brutal actions of Thornton Hains in standing guard over men and women and threatening them with death if they even afforded the commonest acts of decency to a cruelly wounded and dying man, shot from ambush by Thornton's brother.

And, so far did this cur carry his act of brutality that he prevented the wife of the dying man from giving succor to her husband after he was shot.

There was nothing in the manner in which the brutal murder of Annis was accomplished that appeals in the least to brave men and women.

The Sentinel is not defending Annis from the wrath that overtook him by being killed by Captain Hains, the injured party: but we do regard the connivance in the plot to murder Annis by the brother as about the lowest and most brutal and cowardly that anyone calling himself a man ever engaged in, even to aid a brother.

This Thornton Hains is now proposing to write a novel on the "Unwritten Law." The fact of his being a sort of half-baked serial story writer gives color to the rumor. He will make the basis of his story that the state of New York recognizes the unwritten law as the higher law in settling matters such as caused the murder of Annis.

For the good of the whole people, the state of New York should take the learned alienists' words, given in their testimony at the Thornton Hains trial, that he is insane, and send him to a place where he cannot afflict the public with any of his effusions.

Even more than Captain Hains, who actually killed—or better murdered—Annis, do we think that Thornton Hains was the more guilty and should have paid the penalty with his life for having brought death and greater dishonor to all those concerned.