Daily Richmond Whig

Salem Murder—The Salem Gazette gives the following extract from the able charge of Chief Justice Parker, on the important and nice points of Law, involved in the painful investigations now in progress at Salem:

"It may be a subject of inquiry, what constitutes presence within the meaning of the second branch of this enactment, present aiding and abetting in the commission of such crime."

"And the construction of this phrase, which is taken from the common law, has been settled in ancient times by wise and learned sages of the law, and that construction adopted and sanctioned by successive judicial decisions down to the time of the adoption of our Constitution, so that the legislature which enacted this statute, without doubt referred to this construction when they framed it."

"By this construction it is not required that the abettor shall be actually upon the spot when the murder is committed, or even in sight of the more immediate perpetrator or of the victim, to make him a principal."

"If he be at a distance, co-operating in the act by watching to prevent relief, or to give an alarm, or to assist his confederate in escape, having knowledge of the purpose and object of the assassin—this in the eye of the law is being present, aiding and abetting so as to make him a principal in the murder."

"The distinction between a person thus situated and one who is denominated by statute an accessory before the fact is, that the latter is not only in every sense absent from the scene of crime, but is not an immediate participator in it; he may not know the time when and the place where it is committed. He has previously, perhaps days or months before, hired, counselled or procured the deed to be done, but he has no immediate agency in the deed."

"His crime is deemed by the law to be as great as his who strikes the blow; it is often in a moral point of view greater, as it may combine a greater number of desperate and diabolical motives, without the influence of which the crime would never have been committed. It denotes the savage heart of the murderer, without his bold and daring hand. It puts in peril his own soul, and the souls of others, who but for him might have gone free from the guilt of blood. Thus the law punishes the accessory before the fact in the same manner as it punishes the actual perpetrator—they are alike murderers."

"There is at the common law a difference, and it is supposed to exist also under our statute, in regard to the form and the time of trial, between those who are called principals, and accessories before the fact, it being held that unless there be a conviction of a principal there can be no trial of the accessory. This difference, if it exist, is a relic of the unwise refinement of ancient times, there being no good reason why an accessory before the fact to a crime proved to have been committed, should not be tried and punished, although the principal may have escaped, by death or otherwise, the punishment which awaited his crime in this world."

"But if occasion should arise to examine this point, and the common law should not be found to have been varied by our statute, the legislature will probably afford a remedy for future cases."