The Hanging Judge (40 page)

Redpath noticed that both deputies’ faces were glazed over. Had the convictions caught them by surprise? Their expressions had turned mercenary. They would do their job.

“Can I talk to him before he goes?” Redpath asked. “Can his wife have a word with him?”

“I don’t want Sandy,” Moon muttered.

“Five minutes. Then we’re hitting the road,” the black marshal said, taking his handcuffs out. “I’d come straight down.” They took their man out of the courtroom through the side door, each taking an elbow and walking fast. Moon did not look at anyone.

Sandra, her cheeks wet with tears, insisted on coming—she had to see Moon, she said—and Redpath was too overcome to push her away. He’d have to pretend he hadn’t heard what Moon said. During the elevator ride, Sandra held herself together, pressing a hand over her eyes and working to catch her breath, but when they got downstairs to the lockup, she ran up to the bars immediately, took hold of them in both hands, and burst into sobs again.

“Oh baby, how could they do this? Are you okay?”

The white deputy stepped toward her. “Going to have to ask you to step back, ma’am, behind the yellow line.”

Moon moved to the far corner of the cell. He spoke to the grimy wall, slow and careful.

“Babe, go away, please. I love you, but I can’t do this right now. You understand what I’m saying?” He glanced over his shoulder at his attorney and spoke in a harder voice, as though Sandy couldn’t hear. “Bill, get her out of here. I mean it.”

“There are things we can do, baby. Lot of things. We’ll …”

“I mean it, Bill.”

The deputy repeated, “Going to have to ask you to step back, ma’am.”

“I love you. I’m never, never …”

Moon turned around. He crossed his arms over his chest, as though he were trying to hold his heart in. His eyes were shut; his lips were pressed together. After a terrible two seconds, he opened his eyes, kicked a small plastic stool against the wall, and shouted, “No!”

“What?” Sandra’s eyes were wide, shocked.

“No, no, no!” Moon opened his arms and held his clenched fists up in front of his eyes.

“What is it? What is it?” Sandra slapped the marshal’s hand off her shoulder.

“Just step back, please, ma’am. We’re going to have to …”

“Don’t you see?” Moon said, his eyes wide and his mouth gaping. “Can’t you see, after all this damn time? They got me right! They got me dead right! Now please, Bill, please. Just get her the fuck out of here!”

54

W
hen Daley and Halligan were brought before him the day after the guilty verdicts, Justice Sedgwick wasted no time.

“I have the painful task to inform you,” he told the two, “that for the murder of Marcus Lyon, according to the laws of our land, you must die. You are to return to prison, there to remain until the time appointed, thence to be conducted to the place of execution. There to be hung by the neck until you are dead, and your bodies be dissected and anatomized. May God Almighty have mercy on your souls!” The date of execution was set for six weeks following this final appearance before the court: June 5, 1806.

A contemporary report of Justice Sedgwick’s last eight words described them as being delivered “in a very solemn and impressive manner.”

The
Hampshire Federalist
of April 29, 1806 offered the extraordinary understatement that, upon hearing the sentence, Dominic Daley “seemed to be in some degree agitated,” observing that he “fell upon his knees, apparently in prayer.” Daley’s behavior, according to the paper, contrasted sharply with the reaction of his co-defendant James Halligan, “who previous to the trial was by many supposed much the least criminal.” Upon hearing his sentence, however, he “exhibited stronger marks of total insensibility or obstinate and hardened wickedness than is often witnessed.”

Whether Daley and Halligan were “obstinate,” contrite, or simply petrified at the nightmare that had ensnared them, their actions after the sentencing make it clear that they needed no reminder that they were soon to stand before the seat of eternal judgment. The two of them immediately contrived to write and post a letter to Father de Cheverus in Boston, the nearest Catholic clergyman, begging him to come to Northampton and minister to their spiritual needs. De Cheverus, after his appointment years later as the archbishop of Bordeaux, France, retained the message of these two unlettered, condemned men among his private papers, where it was found after his own death.

“We adore,” they wrote, “the decrees of Providence. Although we are not guilty of the crime imputed to us, we have committed other sins, and to expiate them, we accept death with resignation. Please do not refuse us this favor, we are solicitous only about our salvation: It is in your hands. Come to our assistance.”

In the last week of May, Father de Cheverus, having walked the entire distance, arrived in Northampton, where Sheriff Matoon appointed Pomeroy’s Tavern on lower Main Street as his residence. The innkeeper, Asahel Pomeroy, however, refused de Cheverus accommodation when his wife declared that she would never be able to sleep with a “Popish priest” under her roof. As a result, for several nights Father de Cheverus found himself billeted with his parishioners in the county jail. Finally, Joseph Clarke, a non-Catholic living on the south end of Pleasant Street, offered the priest a room in his house. A history of Northampton notes that the inhabitants of the city felt vindicated when, a few years later, Mrs. Clarke died and the residence was struck by lightning, events that were viewed by the locals as divine chastisement for the Clarke family’s kindness to a Catholic.

Meanwhile, Dominic’s wife, Ann Daley, back in Boston and in desperation at these events, drafted and submitted a petition for clemency to Governor Caleb Strong.
The document pointed out that “the evidence offered in the trial was not positive; but merely circumstantial; that a child not fourteen years old was the principal witness.” Mrs. Daley’s petition also reminded the governor that “neither can Your Excellency be unconscious of the strong prejudice prevailing among the Inhabitants of the interior against the common Irish people who have emigrated to the United States; and in the present case the public mind has been influenced in a great degree by conversations and newspaper publications which precluded the possibility of that impartiality of trial which the law contemplates.” In entreating the governor to be merciful, Ann Daley concluded by pointing out that Dominic Daley “has ever been a good son, father, and husband; and ever sustained the reputation of an honest man and a good subject.”

With one eye no doubt on his upcoming election campaign against Attorney General Sullivan, Governor Strong declined to respond to the petition. The public hanging of Dominic Daley and James Halligan would proceed as ordered by Judges Sedgwick and Sewall, on June 5, 1806.

At this time, the inhabitants of Northampton numbered roughly twenty-five hundred, counting thirteen foreigners and three slaves. The entire population of Hampshire County, which in those days extended south all the way to Connecticut and included the town of Springfield, was no more than twenty-five thousand. Out of this number, the
Hampshire Federalist
estimated the crowd that streamed into Northampton on the morning of June 5, 1806 at fifteen thousand. The most distant outreaches of the region—its farms, mills, and shops—on this late spring day must have been virtually drained of their inhabitants, with people of all ages traveling the muddy roads for hours by wagon, on horseback, or on foot to enjoy what was, however sober its purpose, a rare holiday
.

The first public segment of the ceremony began at ten a.m. at Northampton’s Jonathan Edwards Church, a town landmark dating from 1737 and known as “the old church.” Custom in 1806 decreed that a condemned man be afforded the dubious privilege of attending his own funeral service, and Daley and Halligan were transported under guard from the jailhouse to the Protestant church, crowded with onlookers, at the appointed time.

The two convicts had received some comforts. They had been up before dawn and met in private with Father de Cheverus, who had heard their last confessions and gave them the Holy Communion—thus marking the Hampshire County Jail as the site of the first Catholic Mass ever performed in western Massachusetts. Moreover, that morning, both men were granted their wish to die clean-shaven. Their jailers had lent them the necessary razors, after the priest gave his word that neither prisoner would try to cheat the crowd of its spectacle by using these implements to attempt suicide.

The original plan had been that the funeral sermon would be offered by the town’s
resident pastor, Reverend Solomon Williams, but Father de Cheverus protested. Daley and Halligan, in a second letter to him urging the priest to make haste, had written: “Do not reduce us to the necessity of listening, just before we die, to the voice of one who is not a Catholic.” Now, Father de Cheverus insisted to Reverend Williams: “The will of the dying is sacred. They have desired to have no one but myself, and I alone will speak.” Whatever adjustments may have been required to smooth over this hitch, the priest’s sermon was received with approval and described by the
Hampshire Federalist
as “an appropriate and eloquent discourse.” The text was based on 1 John 3:15, “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.”

Father de Cheverus began his remarks by taking indignant note of the throng, especially the large number of women, that had crammed the church to witness the event.

“Orators,” he declaimed, “are usually flattered by having a numerous audience, but I am ashamed of the one now before me. Are there men to whom death of their fellow beings is a spectacle of pleasure, an object of curiosity? But especially you women, what has induced you to come to this place? Is it to wipe away the cold damps of death? Is it to experience the painful emotions which this scene ought to inspire in every feeling heart? No, it is to behold the prisoners’ anguish, to look upon it with tearless, eager, and longing eyes. I blush for you. Your eyes are full of murder! You boast of sensibility, and you say it is the highest virtue of women; but if suffering of others affords you pleasure, and the death of a man is entertainment for your curiosity, then I can no longer believe in your virtue.” A contemporary report stated that upon hearing these words, all the women in the church rose and departed.

At three p.m. in the afternoon, the main event began: the procession to the place of execution. Major General Ebenezer Mattoon, the sheriff of Hampshire County, led the way, magnificent in his full uniform, including saber and gleaming brass helmet. According to a biography of the Mattoon family, the major general had been up pacing the floors of his home on East Street in Amherst all night, dreading his responsibility to officiate at the execution, and particularly his duty to release the mechanism that would break the necks of the two prisoners. An Amherst neighbor, observing his distress, had offered to perform the job for a payment of five dollars, whereupon Mattoon exploded: “Would you take a man’s life for five dollars?” and insisted that he would not surrender his duty, no matter how repellant. He rode from Amherst that morning with his aides trotting along beside him, all armed with pistols hanging from their saddles and presenting what one witness described as “a very imposing appearance.”

Behind Major General Mattoon in the parade that afternoon, the Northampton militia marched in formation, followed by a band playing the Death March. The site of the hanging was an area west of the town known as Pancake Plain, traditionally an Indian burial ground and adjacent to what would later be the entrance to Northampton State Hospital, a public mental institution. At a modest pace, the distance from the church to this location would have required no more than half an hour.

When everyone had arrived, and the prisoners and officers had mounted the scaffolding, Dominic Daley faced the crowd and drew out a small piece of paper. In a voice that carried clearly over the murmuring assembly, he read the following statement on behalf of himself and James Halligan:

“At this awful moment of appearing before the tribunal of the Almighty, and knowing that telling a falsehood would be eternal perdition to our poor souls, we solemnly declare we are perfectly innocent of the crime for which we suffer or of any other murder or robbery; we never saw, to our knowledge, Marcus Lyon in our lives; and, as unaccountable as it may appear, the boy never saw one of us looking at him at or near a fence, or any of us either leading, driving, or riding a horse, and we never went off the high road.

“We blame no one, we forgive everyone! We submit to our fate as being the will of the Almighty and beg of Him to be merciful to us through the merits of his Divine Son, our blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ. Our sincere thanks to Father de Cheverus for his long and kind attention to us.”

At that point, according to the
Hampshire Gazette
, Dominic Daley handed the scrap of paper to Major General Mattoon, and he and James Halligan lowered their heads to allow the officers to place the nooses around their necks. An eight-year-old boy, Theodore Rust, was watching from the branches of a nearby tree. He recalled eighty years later how Major General Mattoon rode up to the gallows “and with a knife or hatchet cut the rope” dropping the two prisoners to their deaths.

The corpses of Daley and Halligan were removed to a barn to be “dissected and anatomized” in obedience to Justice Sedgwick’s order. Their work done, Major General Mattoon and the party of guards retired to the home of one Captain Cook for a banquet that cost the county more than $25; other expenses included $8 for the dinner served to the clergy, $7 to Hezekiah Russell, who built the gallows, and $2.17 for ropes and cords.

PART FOUR