The Strange Case of Edgar

One day, soon after joining the staff of NATIONAL REVIEW, I came upon a clipping—one of scores sent intousby readers as having, possibly, some remote interest for us—which gave the details of a day in the life of Edgar Smith Jr., 34837 D.H. in the State Prison at Trenton, New Jersey, where he had lived the last five of his 29 years under sentence of death for murder in the first degree. Newspaper clippings about individual murders or murderers don’t often get sent to national review, where our concern tends to be for macrocosmic crime; but Edgar Smith was no ordinary criminal. The reporter asked him how he spent his leisure time. “In reading,” the prisoner replied. “In reading what?” the reporter pursued. “In reading all kinds of things,” Smith responded. “I have developed political interests, and I very much enjoyed Senator Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and regularly read NATIONAL REVIEW.”

I passed the clipping around. The prisoner, whose residence in the Death House had already broken the state record, was, like Caryl Chessman, supervising his own legal strategy, carrying on a complex series of legal maneuvers—successfully. After all, he was reading national review in this world, cultivating, perhaps, a reading habit suitable to the next: but one by one the avenues of escape were closing off. And soon, soon after these words appear, the last avenue of escape being closed, he is to die, in expiation of one of the ghastliest crimes I have ever heard of, leaving only the question, which assaults me after days and weeks and months of meditation—did he in fact kill the girl? I don’t know. He may have. I know only this much. That knowing what I now do about the case and about Edgar Smith, I would not, if I had been a member of that jury, have voted to execute him for first degree murder, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Not even if he were a reader of the New Republic.

DC

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D. G. M. Coxe

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One day, soon after joining the staff of NATIONAL REVIEW, I came upon a clipping—one of scores sent intousby readers as having, possibly, some remote interest for us—which gave the details of a day in the life of Edgar Smith Jr., 34837 D.H. in the State Prison at Trenton, New Jersey, where he had lived the last five of his 29 years under sentence of death for murder in the first degree. Newspaper clippings about individual murders or murderers don’t often get sent to national review, where our concern tends to be for macrocosmic crime; but Edgar Smith was no ordinary criminal. The reporter asked him how he spent his leisure time. “In reading,” the prisoner replied. “In reading what?” the reporter pursued. “In reading all kinds of things,” Smith responded. “I have developed political interests, and I very much enjoyed Senator Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and regularly read NATIONAL REVIEW.”

I passed the clipping around. The prisoner, whose residence in the Death House had already broken the state record, was, like Caryl Chessman, supervising his own legal strategy, carrying on a complex series of legal maneuvers—successfully. After all, he was reading national review in this world, cultivating, perhaps, a reading habit suitable to the next: but one by one the avenues of escape were closing off. And soon, soon after these words appear, the last avenue of escape being closed, he is to die, in expiation of one of the ghastliest crimes I have ever heard of, leaving only the question, which assaults me after days and weeks and months of meditation—did he in fact kill the girl? I don’t know. He may have. I know only this much. That knowing what I now do about the case and about Edgar Smith, I would not, if I had been a member of that jury, have voted to execute him for first degree murder, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Not even if he were a reader of the New Republic.