REDUCES SENTENCE
TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS
JAMES MARKIN WILL SERVE
15 INSTEAD OF 43.
Judge Casteel Says Long Prison
Terms Are Not Good for Either
a Criminal or Society.
Markin a Burglar.
I agere with the mayor of Toledo, Brand Whitlock I think is his name, that long prison terms, except for particular cases, are not good for either a criminal or for society," delcared Judge B. J. Casteel from the Jackson County criminal court bench yesterday, after he had sliced twenty-eight years off the time a jury had declared James Markin should serve for robbing the residences of J. J. Heim and William Kenefick.
"There is no more sense in keeping a man in the penitentiary for thirty or forty years because of some crime, than in sentencing a smallpox patient to the hospital for a year, when he can be cured in two weeks. Whenever the authorities are conviced that a man has undergone a change of heart, he should be freed from prison, just as a sick man is released from a hospital when he recovers his health.
"Markin, whom a jury said should serve forty-three years for the two burglaries, is now 49 years old, I am informed. If he served his term in prison he would be dead or past 90 when the sentence expires. Ffiteen years from now he will be past 60. He ought to be old enough to know how to behave himself by that time and release should not be a detriment to society."
Phil Clear was Markin's attorney at his trials and made the appeal yesterday for the cutting down of the sentences. Prosecuting Attorney I. B. Kimbrell said that he did not favor shortening the sentences, as twelve men from over Jackson county who heard the evidence ought to have known what was a fit punishment. Kimbrell, however, asaid that he would make no recommendation other than that Judge Casteel follow his own sense of justice.
Judge Casteel presides over the criminal court of Buchanan county, at St. Joseph. He was assigned to try the Markin case by Judge W. H. Wallace when Markin filed an application for a change of venue.
