him in importance was the secretary and treasurer, Charles R. Heike, who was convicted.  Various other officials and employees of the Trust, and various Government employees, were indicted, and most of them convicted.  Ernest W. Gerbracht, the superintendent of one of the refineries, was convicted, but his sentence was commuted to a short jail imprisonment, because he became a Government witness and greatly assisted the Government in the suits.

Heike’s sentence was commuted so as to excuse him from going to the penitentiary; just as the penitentiary sentence of Morse, the big New York banker, who was convicted of gross fraud and misapplication of funds, was commuted.  Both commutations were granted long after I left office.  In each case the commutation was granted because, as was stated, of the prisoner’s age and state of health.  In Morse’s case the President originally refused the request, saying that Morse had exhibited “fraudulent and criminal disregard of the trust imposed upon him,” that “he was entirely unscrupulous as to the methods he adopted,” and “that he seemed at times to be absolutely heartless with regard to the consequences to others, and he showed great shrewdness in obtaining large sums of money from the bank without adequate security and without making himself personally liable therefor.”  The two cases may be considered in connection with the announcement in the public press that on May 17, 1913, the President commuted the sentence of Lewis A. Banks, who was serving a very long term penitentiary sentence for an attack on a girl in the Indian Territory; “the reason for the commutation which is set forth in the press being that ‘Banks is in poor health.’”

It is no easy matter to balance the claims of justice and mercy in such cases.  In these three cases, of all of which I had personal cognizance, I disagreed radically with the views my successors took, and with the views which many respectable men took who in these and similar cases, both while I was in office and afterward, urged me to show, or to ask others to show, clemency.  It then seemed to me, and it now seems to me, that such clemency is from the larger standpoint a gross wrong to the men and women of the country.

One of the former special assistants of the district-attorney, Mr. W. Cleveland Runyon, in commenting bitterly on the release of Heike and Morse on account of their health, pointed out that their health apparently became good when once they themselves became free men, and added: 

“The commutation of these sentences amounts to a direct interference with the administration of justice by the courts.  Heike got a $25,000 salary and has escaped his imprisonment, but what about the six $18 a week checkers, who were sent to jail, one of them a man of more than sixty?  It is cases like this that create discontent and anarchy.  They make it seem plain that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor man, and I for one will protest.”