| 320 be required, notwithstanding your petitioners allege that he ought to have been acquitted. Your petitioners also allege that the commitment was an illegal commitment, for the law requires that a copy of the testimony should be put in the hands of the jailer, which was not done. Your petitioners allege that the prisoner has been denied the privilege of the law in a writ of habeas corpus, by the judges of this county. Whether they have prejudged the case of the prisoner, or whether they are not willing to administer law and justice to the prisoner, or that they are intimidated by the high office of Judge King, who only acted in the case of the prisoners as a committing magistrate, a conservator of the peace, or by the threats of a lawless mob, your petitioners are not able to say; but is a fact that they do not come forward boldly and administer the law to the relief of the prisoner; and, further, your petitioners allege that immediately after the prisoner was taken, his family was frightened and driven out of their house, and that, too, by the witnesses on the part of the State, and plundered of their goods; that the prisoner was robbed of a very fine horse, saddle, and bridle, and other property of considerable amount; that they (the witnesses), in connection with the mob, have finally succeeded, by vile threatening and foul abuse, in driving the family of the prisoner out of the State, with little or no means and without a protector, and their very subsistence depends on the liberty of the prisoner. And your petitioners allege that he is not guilty of any crime whereby he should be restrained of his liberty, from a personal knowledge, having been with him and being personally acquainted with the whole of the difficulties between the Mormons and their persecutors; and, that he has never acted, at any time, only in his own defense, and that too on his own ground, property, and possessions; that the prisoner has never commanded any military company, nor held any military authority, neither any other office, real or pretended, in the State of Missouri, except that of a religious teacher; that he has never bore arms in the military rank, and in all such cases has acted as a private character and as an individual.
"How, then, your petitioners would ask, can it be possible
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