AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
After a careful reading of the testimony, I wrote an opinion refusing the pardon and saying:
The human mind is so constituted that in its narrations it depends rather upon memory than imagination. All false statements are apt to have much truth blended with them to make them credible. Even novels, which are admittedly works of imagination, describe real persons, scenes and incidents. When Cutaiar told the false story concerning Logue he described a death caused by no weapon. The jury may not have been far from the truth if they came to the conclusion that when he said: “He began beating her. He struck her on the side of the face with one hand and on the other side of the face with his fist, and than choked her until she fell on the floor, from which she never recovered,” and continued: “her face was all kind of black and her eyes bulging and staring-like and open-like, she had suffocated,” he was describing events and conditions he had actually seen.
I entertained not the slightest doubt that it was a brutal murder for money. Some months afterward I made an inspection of the Eastern Penitentiary and, when it had been completed, the warden took me to some of the cells to see the inmates. He unlocked a door and disclosed two cells, an outer and an inner, the latter reached through a door so low that a man entering would have to stoop. On invitation I stepped inside, leaving the warden in the corridor. Inside, a man perhaps fifty years of age, with light hair, blue eyes and sandy complexion smilingly greeted me and asked me to look at the shop where he did his work as a shoemaker. I stooped and entered the inner compartment and he followed and stood at the door. The sharpened shoemaker's knife with which he cut the leather lay on the table within his easy reach. Then his smile ceased, he looked me in the face and said:
“I am Cutaiar.”
He was the murderer whose pardon I had refused. On the instant there flashed across my mind that dramatic scene in Victor Hugo's novel Quatre—vingt—treize, where
