Deaths Decreed

Precisely at 8 a. m. punctual Peruvian officers sat down with a great clinking of spurs and clattering of swords in Lima last week to do something about the jaunty 19-year-old youth who had punctured President Luis Sanchez Cerro of Peru with a bullet in church (TIME, March 14).

Arraigned before the court-martial, Jose Melgar grinned cheerfully, though he answered the officers' questions with respect. Since punctured President Sanchez Cerro was alive last week and not expected to die, Puncturer Melgar knew he had comparatively little to fear. To win popularity and votes almost any punctured public man will try to get his assailant off. Last week in Lima the court-martial sat from 8 a. m. until 4 a. m.--then sentenced to death both Puncturer Melgar and his accomplice, Juan Seoane, 32, whose brother Manuel is the Leader of Peru's Aprista (Opposition) Party. The sentences of death, imposed just as dawn was breaking, were ordered carried out by a firing squad at high noon the same day. Wearily the officer-judges clunked and clanked home to bed.

When the officers woke up it was long past noon, but nobody had yet been shot. Aprista Party members were deluging the Government with telegrams demanding clemency. Telegraphed the Aprista Party Leader:

I AM WILLING TO SUBSTITUTE FOR MY BROTHER JUAN IN EVENT THE DEATH PENALTY IS TO BE EXACTED

MANUEL SEOANE

Devoutly the mothers of the two youths besought the Blessed Virgin to intercede with her Son, then besought the old mother of President Sanchez Cerro to intercede with her son. Still weak from loss of blood, punctured President Sanchez Cerro lay abed, lay low.

Into action went Peru's Congress. It passed a bill specifically empowering the President "to commute death sentences imposed on would-be murderers to penal servitude." This was certainly a broad hint. Lest it vex the punctured President, whose military rank last week was that of Lieutenant Colonel, the Congress passed another bill promoting him retroactively to the rank of Colonel, this appointment to date from Aug. 22, 1930.

On that date Lieut. Col. Sanchez Cerro started the revolution which overthrew the late, famed President Augusto B. Leguia, "The Bantam Roosevelt of Peru." The compliment implied by Congress in its retroactive promotion was therefore a most delicate one. Touched, the President signed the Congress' clemency bill, thus making it most probable that he will commute the two death sentences.

Neither tried nor sentenced to Death was John Wilkes Booth. After killing President Abraham Lincoln he escaped to Virginia, was tracked down and shot in a barn which his pursuers had ignited--though some say he escaped entirely, roamed the land for years incognito.

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