Was this Lincoln conspirator guilty? At this museum, you decide.

[John Fazio]

(04-21-2016 02:24 PM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(04-21-2016 10:52 AM)John Fazio Wrote:  Roger:

Thanks for the reference.

The subject of Mary's guilt or innocence is covered in detail in Chapter 5 of Decapitating the Union. A consideration of as much inculpatory and exculpatory evidence as I could find led me to the conclusion that she was guilty of complicity in the assassination, but that she should not have been executed. Had Johnson followed the 5-4 recommendation of the Commissioners to spare her, she would not have been executed. Johnson's claim that he never saw the petition for clemency submitted by Judge Advocate Joseph Holt is unconvincing.

John

John, I believe Laurie agrees with you that she should not have been executed, but I am going to quote from a previous post she made:

"...in teaching the Lincoln conspiracy to children (and many adults), I use an analogy to make the principles of "vicarious liability" and "laws of conspiracy" better to understand. First, many don't know what the word "conspiracy" even means. The minute I use the word "gang," however, they come alive. That (unfortunately) is something they can relate to in this day and age.

My analogy is the idea of a bank robbery where three members of that gang decide to rob a bank. One is the get-away driver and remains in the car while the other two enter the bank. In the course of the robbery, one of the guys shoots and kills a bank employee. Who is guilty of murder? The students are surprised to discover that, under the definition of vicarious liability, technically they all are.

I then change the scenario and have the driver outside change his mind, spot a cop on the corner, and report that a bank robbery is in progress. By the time the cop gets to the bank, however, the murder has already been committed. Will a jury find the driver guilty of murder? Probably not, because he tried to stop the bank robbers by going to an authority (one must be able to stop a conspiracy, not just drop out)."

My question would be...under the concept of vicarious liability, as Laurie explained it, why shouldn't she be executed? She had a window of opportunity to go to the authorities (as did Atzerodt) but did not do so.

Roger:

If the Commissioners had applied the conspiracy law of the time strictly (which law was substantially the same as it is now), they would have sentenced all of the conspirators to death. But they didn't apply the law strictly. Rather, they took account of the proximity of the conspirators, in time and place, to the assassination of Lincoln and the attempted assassination of Seward. Thus, Arnold was spared because he had apparently abandoned the conspiracy two weeks earlier when he took a job in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, and was there on the night of the assassination. O'Laughlen was spared, despite the fact that he was in Washington on the 14th, because he was not identified as having any role in the events of the 14th, because his alibi for the night of the 13th held up and because his link to Arnold was stronger than his link to Booth. Dr. Mudd was spared (by one vote) because he was on his farm, some 30 miles from Washington, on the fateful night. And Spangler was spared because the evidence against him was very weak and because his role was, at most, peripheral. (He was, in fact, innocent.) Mary's role was similarly peripheral. She was not a murderer or an attempted murderer; she was a facilitator. That fact, together with her age, gender and poor health, should have been enough to save her, inasmuch as the Commissioners were applying the conspiracy law loosely, not strictly. And it was enough for five of the nine Commissioners. But their wishes were frustrated by the perfidy of Johnson, who had made up his mind not to be deterred from his course, not even by Adele Cutts Douglas, the only person to even reach him in the period immediately preceding Mary's execution.

John