I found this and thought it was very interesting......a case was one where a citizen of the Cherokee Nation killed another citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He was indicted by the grand jury, arrested, tried before a jury of his peers, who returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced, by the Court, to be hanged, and a commitment was issued that he be confined in the National prison at Tahlequah until the day of execution, and then on the day of the execution named that he should be taken from the jail and hanged by the high sheriff of the Cherokee Nation. On the way from the District Court, where he was tried, to Tahlequah, a distance of twenty miles across the hills, he escaped from his guards, and left the country. A few months afterwards the Act of Congress, on the 28th of June, 1898, commonly known as the Curtis Bill, became a law, which provided, by its terms, that from and after the 1st day of July, 1898, that none of the judicial officers of the Cherokee Nation should perform any of the duties of their several offices, and a few months later, I received a letter from this defendant from away down in Arkansas, stating that he wished me to take up his case before the Board of Pardons of the Cherokee Nation, and get his sentence commuted to five years in the National Prison, and if I could do this that he would return and submit to imprisonment for this term. After looking up the matter and deciding that the time for his execution had already passed; that the sheriff, whose duty it was to arrest him, had been deprived of his office; that the judge, who tried him, could no longer re-sentence him, and that the high sheriff, whose duty it was to execute him, had been deprived of his office, that there was no power in the only officers, who could deal with his case, to further interfere with him, I advised him to come home and go to his family and be a good citizen. Here is a case where a man was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced, and who was never pardoned, yet he is a free man today, with no power vested in any tribunal to deprive him of his liberty.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 07:37:35 +0000
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