Mormon being killed by an unknown assailant in Nauvoo, Illinois, an act he characterized as "a deed of charity" because "he might now possibly be redeemed in the eternal world" . In the Salt Lake valley, Young maintained a Council of Fifty composed of religious leaders as a kind of legislature, but this body's power was limited . In 1849, as Young and the Council of Fifty were drafting a plan for a proposed State of Deseret, Young spoke to the Council about what to do with thieves, murderers, and adulterers, and said, "I want their cursed heads to be cut off that they may atone for their crimes". The Council voted the next day that an imprisoned man "had forfeited his head" and to "dispose of him privately" (March 4 entry). Two weeks later, Young recommended decapitation for the man and a fellow prisoner, but the Council decided to let them live. Later in 1851, the General Assembly of the State of Deseret, picked by the Council of Fifty, adopted a capital punishment provision allowing decapitation as a means of execution, which would remain in force until 1888 . In a speech before the Utah Territory's legislature on February 5, 1852, Young appeared to advocate the passage of a law that required decapitation for whites who were "condemned by the Law" for miscegenation with black people . He told the legislature that miscegenation was a grave sin that would bring a curse upon a man and all of his children that were produced as a result of the union . He said that if a white Mormon "in an unguarded moment should commit such a transgression", decapitation "would do a great deal towards atoning for the sin...it would do them good that they might be saved with their Bre[theren]" . He said, "It is the greatest blessing that could come to some men to shed their blood on the ground, and let it come up before the Lord as an atonement" . Impending theocratic blood atonement for "covenant breaking" Mormons During the Mormon Reformation, church leaders began to criss-cross Mormon communities in a dramatic call for greater orthodoxy and religious purity. Brigham Young, who was then a theocratic leader, began preparing church members for what they thought was the quickly approaching Second Coming, and a time of "Celestial law" in the Utah Territory. According to Young: "The time is