Phenix Gazette

SENTENCE OF MARKLEY.

The following are the remarks of Judge Buchanan in pronouncing sentence of death on John Markley, who was tried and convicted last week in Frederick County, of the crime of murder:

After a rigid and laborious examination of many witnesses, and an attentive and patient hearing of counsel in your behalf, who with a zeal and ability creditable to themselves and worthy of a better cause, left undone in conducting your defence, nothing that ingenuity could suggest, you have been pronounced guilty by a jury of your own choice, of the horrid crime of murder of the first degree, attended by circumstances disclosed in evidence, of the most shocking character; for which you are doomed to suffer the highest and most solemn punishment known to the laws of this state, whose sentence it has become my duty as the organ of this court to pronounce; a duty to the discharge of which I approach with feelings correspondent to the appalling magnitude of the offence with which you stand charged, my deep settled and painful conviction of your guilt, and the awful sentence of the penalty you have incurred.

To die is the appointed lot of man, but death in its mildest and least hideous form is not devoid of terrors even for such as are best prepared to die. It is a sad adieu 'twixt soul and body, until the coming of that day, when at the sound of the last trump, the portals of the grave shall be thrown open, and the earth be made to yield up its dead. And when it is inflicted as a just and merited punishment for crime—when a murderer is called to yield up his life on the altar of retributive justice, however obdurate he may have become, however seared his conscience, and whatever outward appearance of hardihood and insensibility he may assume, it is difficult if not impossible for him to contemplate it without horror, and an awful and inward dread of entering upon a different and unknown state of existence, in another and unknown world, with the stain of blood upon his hands, and the weight of withering and consuming guilt pressing upon his soul. Murder of any degree, and under any circumstances is shocking to humanity; and he who is not lost to every proper feeling, must ever turn from the contemplation of it with abhorrence; but that which has been perpetrated by you, bears the stamp of the highest grade of atrocity.

John Newey who was your uncle, and in whose blood you have so cruelly and wilfully revelled, was some years ago unfortunately for him and his family, called by the process of this court to give evidence against you in a prosecution that consigned you to the penitentiary; for which, as now appears in evidence, you then made a vow of vengeance, and have but too faithfully kept that fatal vow.

Discharged from the penitentiary on the expiration of the term for which you were sentenced, with revenge still rankling in your heart, and bent upon the destruction not only of him, who had alone offended, (if indeed offence it could be called, to give evidence when required in a court of justice,) but of all his family, you sought the habitation of your devoted victims and at the still dead hour of night, stole into the apartment in which they slept, unconscious of their approaching fate, and dreaming of naught but safety under their own peaceful and quiet roof. Did you not shudder as you entered into such a sanctuary? Did you not pause and tremble, ere you gave the first fatal stroke? A wife confidently reposing in the arms of her husband, and bearing the unborn pledge of their mutual affection, (and such I learn was the advanced condition of Mrs. Newey,) with her two little children sleeping at her side, was a scene fit for angels to come down from heaven to look upon—a scene calculated it would seem, to excite the warmest sympathies of the human heart, to shake the settled purpose, and stay the uplifted hand of the most hardened and practised assassin. Yet it did not unsettle your bloody purpose, nor arrest your murderous hand. But in the emphatic language of the indictment, being moved and subdued by the instigation of the devil, for no other influence could have prompted to such an outrage, you broke through all restraint, and regardless of the laws, both of God and man, and reckless of every consequence, plunged into a scene of shocking and complicated crime, to which no parallel is remembered, and such as it is believed the pages of judicial history furnish no record of. The husband and wife, their two little innocent children and unborn infant, her father who lodged in a room above and a lad an inmate of the house, were all, all involved in one common ruin, all inhumanly murdered, and by you. And after having first plundered it, with the calculating coolness and deliberation of a demon, you set fire to the house in which they had slept, in imaginary security, and which but for you might have continued the abode of innocence and peace; with a view no doubt, to obliterate all traces of violence by consuming their mangled and lifeless bodies in the devouring element, and thereby to destroy all evidence of their having come to their untimely end by means of any human agency.

But did you also hope to hide your guilt, from the all seeing and omnipresent God, to whom all things are known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Vain and presumptuous hope—the very means resorted to for safety and concealment, proved the ready and sure means of your detection. The flame you lighted to consume their bodies, served also to attract and light the neighbors to the scene of desolation, before the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Newey were entirely consumed, the mortal wounds still visible upon which plainly indicated that a murderer had been there! though horrible to relate, the bodies of all the rest were burnt to ashes. The finger of suspicion directed by the unerring hand of Providence pointed to you as the fell destroyer of those for whose blood you will soon be required to make atonement with your own; and notwithstanding your supposed well laid scheme of concealment and imaginary security, you blindly carried about you the daring evidence of your guilt, unconscious of the dangers that beset you on all sides, and of the stroke was about to fall upon and crush you. So it has always been, and so it ever will be—Sooner or later the vengeance of heaven never fails to overtake the guilty. Such are the inscrutable works of Providence, and such the blindness and folly of poor vain and frail humanity.

Do me the justice to believe that I have no wish to insult or unnecessarily wound your feelings! No unhappy man, I set here for no such unhallowed purpose, and should be unworthy of the seat I occupy, if I were capable of wantonly doing so. But painful as the duty is, and deeply as I regret having such a duty to perform, I must speak of things as they are, and earnestly hope you may be awakened to a just and full sense of the enormity of the guilt with which you are unfortunately overwhelmed and of the necessity there is for endeavoring to be prepared to meet the inevitable doom that awaits you. And that you will not suffer yourself to be drawn into a fatal delusion, by an ill grounded hope of pardon, or of any interposition in your behalf by the Executive authority of the state of which I feel it my duty to apprise you, that I sincerely believe there is not the remotest probability.—Permit me therefore to intreat you, to turn your attention while yet you may, to that high and dread tribunal, upon which, all you have now to hope for, peace and happiness in another world must alone depend—and earnestly and diligently to employ what yet remains to you of this transitory life, in humble supplication to the Throne of grace, for pardon and for forgiveness of your sins—and may God of his infinite mercy incline and guide your heart to penitence and prayer, strengthen and support you in the hour of trial, and suffer you not at the last sad moment for any pains of death to fall from him.

Your sentence is, that you be taken to the jail of Frederick county from whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, at such time as shall be duly appointed, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead.