“Items.

Responsibility of Licensing the Sale of Liquor.– We copy from The Voice, a petition to the Board of Pardons of Pennsylvania, praying that the sentence of death be not executed on one Sidney Ware, who, while crazy with drink, murdered two men.  It presents in a striking manner the responsibility which the State assumes in licensing drinking saloons; and it was probably with the intention of teaching that lesson that the petition was put in circulation.

‘We respectively pray for the pardon of said Ware for the following reasons:

1st. He was violently insane from drinking a poisonous liquid, furnished –without cost to him–by, and in the house of August Brauer : Whose permit or license was not revoked after the murder.

2d. The Judges of Dauphine County had given to the said August Brauer for and in consideration of $150, a permit to furnish the said Ware and others the poison which rendered him insane.

3rd. The legislators of the Commonwealth enacted the law permitting the Judges to permit the said August Brauer to furnish the said Ware and others the poisonous liquid.

4th. A majority of the male citizens of the Commonwealth voted for and elected these lawmakers, knowing that they favored a law permitting the Judges to sell a permit to the said August Brauer to furnish Ware and others with the poisonous liquid, which they knew produces temporary insanity.

5th. All of these men had guilty knowledge of the possibility and even probability of the criminal results of the several parts enacted.  This knowledge had come to them through a reproduction by the public press, public speakers, and the printed page of the fact that the furnishing as a beverage of said poisonous liquid under forms of law, produces yearly in Pennsylvania many thousand unnatural deaths.  Many of these being murders and suicides.  These facts are taken from statistics of criminal records, are sworn to by public officers and have been published broadcast for many years.

6th. Your petitioners desire to emphasize the fact that neither August Brauer who furnished the poisonous liquid  to Ware; nor the Judges who sold him the permit to do so; nor the legislators who enacted the law; nor the citizens who voted for them, have been apprehended, indicted or tried, though clearly everyone of them was mediate or immediate parllceps criminis.’ ”

Reference Data:

The Friend, Vol. 64, 1891, page 239