The Jailhouse Stabbing that Shocked Seattle
After a violent attempt to escape custody, a prisoner is left to suffer in a cell without his customary opium, as the city’s law enforcement cleans house.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Jailer Patrick Farraher was able to be about yesterday, although very sore and stiff from wounds and bruises received in the terrible struggle of the previous day. It will be many days before he will entirely recover. Jim Davis, the prisoner he shot while attempting to escape, is getting along very well. Davis, Clark, and Martin all spent Thursday night in fear and trembling, having heard that a mob had been organized to treat them to a 'lamp-post neck-tie,' and not being aware that the jail was too strongly guarded to prevent this. Barney Martin has been undergoing what to him is the worst of all punishments since his return to jail. His opium pipe has been taken from him, and yesterday he laid in agony because he could not have the drug. He pleaded with the jailer to save his life by giving him some; but was told he would have to die if he required the death-drug to sustain him.
“Barney Martin has been undergoing what to him is the worst of all punishments since his return to jail. His opium pipe has been taken from him.”
This account of a 1889 jailhouse struggle reveals the brutal, often fatal, reality of early Seattle’s criminal justice system and the role of addiction in incarceration. While modern facilities have evolved, the historical reliance on punitive 'withdrawal' as a form of added punishment continues to spark contemporary debates about medical care and human rights within our correctional institutions.
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