Under each of the forty-one indictments against this prisoner for stealing, he is liable, if convicted, to be sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, which would make an aggregate imprisonment of more than eight hundred years.
Horace Mann: “Under each of the forty-one indictments against this prisoner for stealing, he is liable, if convicted, to be sentenced…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann illustrates the absurdity of facing multiple lengthy sentences for a single act of theft.
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Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.
Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.
My instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, may all mislead; but from the first time, now years ago, when I heard this subject broached, my instincts, reason, judgment, conscience, have all been in its favor.





