| “ | Mister, you're just talkin' words! Justice, right and wrong. They sound good in this nice warm room and a nice full stomach, just a few feet away from a soft bed. They sound nice, and they go down easy! But you just try 'em on an ice cold mesa, where another man's bread or another man's jacket stands between you and stayin' alive. You get in this machine of yours, and you go back to where I was, and you talk about your law and your order and your justice. They're gonna sound different! Mister, I know your kind. Your clean face, your Johnny-come-lately dandies. You come out in your warm trains, rolling over the graves of men like me! I just hate your KIND! | „ |
| ~ Caswell explaining that justice is relative before killing Manion. |
Joe Caswell is the protagonist villain of the Twilight Zone episode "Execution". He is an outlaw who is saved from the noose at the last moment by a time machine. He was portrayed by the late Albert Salmi, who also played fellow Twilight Zone villain William J. Feathersmith.
Biography[]
At the beginning of the episode, Caswell is about to be hanged for twenty murders, with a posse ready to send the horse he is sitting on gallop away, causing him to fall and be hanged by the noose around his neck. However, when they do hang him, Caswell fades away and appears in a laboratory in 1960. A man named Professor Manion explains that he brought him to 1960 using a time machine, but is unnerved when he sees the rope burn around Caswell's neck. Caswell admits that he's killed twenty people and was about to be hanged, and Manion attempts to send him back to his execution. Enraged, Caswell attacks Manion and smashes his head with a lamp cracking his skull.
Following the murder, Caswell leaves the building but is overwhelmed by the lights and noise, resulting in a car almost hitting him. Panicking, Caswell shoots the driver and runs back into Manion's laboratory, where he breaks down and begins pleading with Manion's corpse for help. Just then, thief Paul Johnson breaks into the lab to rob it and is attacked by Caswell. In the ensuing struggle, Johnson manages to wrap the cord from Manion's blind around Caswell's neck and knock him to the ground, asphyxiating Caswell to death.
