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." In dealing with Heike the individual (or Morse or any other individual), it is necessary to emphasize the social aspects of his case.

The moral of the Heike case, as has been well said, is "how easy it is for a man in modern corporate organization to drift into wrongdoing." The moral restraints are loosened in the case of a man like Heike by the insulation of himself from the sordid details of crime, through industrially coerced intervening agents.

Professor Ross has made the penetrating observation that "distance disinfects dividends"; it also weakens individual responsibility, particularly on the part of the very managers of large business, who should feel it most acutely.