ExecutedToday.com

(Thanks to David Carson of the informative Texas Execution Information Center for the guest post, originally run on his site. -ed.)

Craig Neil Ogan, 47, was executed by lethal injection on 19 November 2002 in Huntsville, Texas for the murder of a police officer.

Mugshot clipped from Texas Department of Criminal Justice. More information, including some of Ogan’s own writing, at the Clark County Prosecutor site.

Craig Ogan had worked as an informant for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency since January 1988. Upon his request, the DEA relocated him from St. Louis to Houston in late 1989 after his identity had been revealed in a court proceeding. Ogan was under orders to not personally get involved in any drug transactions. He was also prohibited from carrying a weapon. Despite these instructions, Ogan insisted on arming himself and seeking involvement in drug transactions.

On 8 December 1989, Ogan, then 34, called the DEA agent who supervised him and told him that he was in a restaurant where he had just had an armed confrontation over a drug deal that fell through. He said that a man pointed a gun at his head and called him “narc.” He said that he feared for his life and asked for an escort from the restaurant. The agent arranged for two Houston police officers to escort Ogan from the restaurant back to his apartment. Once at the apartment, the officers watched as Ogan packed his belongings, which included a pistol, a sawed-off shotgun, and some knives. They then followed him to a motel. Ogan checked into a room, and the officers left at around 9:00 p.m.

At about 12:30 a.m., Ogan went to the lobby to complain about his telephone charges and the heater in his room. He argued loudly with the clerk and began kicking at a door. When the clerk called 9-1-1 for assistance, Ogan left.

Around this time, Houston police officers Clay Morgan Gainer and James C. Boswell pulled a car into a parking lot across the street from the motel, for a minor traffic violation. Ogan, then 34, walked over to them and knocked on the passenger window. Officer Boswell, 29, lowered his window and asked Ogan what he wanted. After a heated exchange, Boswell got out of the car. Ogan took Boswell’s pistol and shot him once in the head. He ran. Officer Gainer chased Ogan on foot, shot him in the back, and arrested him.

At Ogan’s trial, Gainer testified that when Boswell lowered his window and asked Ogan what he wanted, Ogan replied, “DEA dropped me off out here, and I’m cold.” Boswell told Ogan that they would help him as soon as they finished with the traffic stop, and to back away from the car. Boswell then raised his window. Ogan, however, demanded immediate attention. He knocked on Boswell’s window again, repeating that he was a DEA informant and that he was cold. Boswell told him, “You need to get out of here if you are not willing to step out of the way and wait. You either need to leave, or you are going to jail.” Ogan persisted with his demands. Boswell got out of the police car. According to Gainer, Boswell removed his sidearm from the holster and held it down against his leg. As he was reaching into the car to unlock the back door, Ogan grabbed Boswell’s gun and shot him once in the head. Ogan then said, “Well, [expletive] you then” and ran.

In addition to the above testimony, Darryl O’Leary, one of the two officers who escorted Ogan from the restaurant, testified that Ogan was “extremely excited” when he arrived. O’Leary said that when he told Ogan he could not take him until a backup officer arrived, Ogan became “impatient, hostile, and loud.”

Ogan had no prior criminal convictions. He had numerous assault charges that had been filed against him, then dismissed.

Sally Webster, a psychologist testifying for the defense, said that Ogan suffered from paranoia and had a passive-aggressive personality, but that these disorders were not mental illnesses and had no bearing on his competency to stand trial. She described Ogan’s mental state on 8 and 9 December as “anxious, agitated, almost hyperactive, very touchy, very worried.” Ogan’s lawyers called Webster to testify in an attempt to assert his mental state as a mitigating factor in determining his punishment, but the tactic backfired. Instead, prosecutors convinced the jury that Ogan’s history of high-strung paranoia made him a future danger to society.

A jury convicted Ogan of capital murder in June 1990 and sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in April 1993. All of his subsequent appeals in state and federal court were denied.

In his appeals, Ogan’s attorneys claimed that their client suffered from a mental illness and that his trial counsel was incompetent for failing to use that in his defense. Ogan, who had an IQ of 140, had attended college, and spoke several languages, told a reporter, “They’re trying to sell me as a nut case. I don’t appreciate that.”

Ogan had a longstanding interest in espionage and had ambitions of joining the Central Intelligence Agency. In one of his letters from death row, he claimed that he had an appointment for an interview with the CIA the day he killed Officer Boswell. His career as a spy, however, never took off. At his trial, DEA agents testified that they considered Ogan to be, though a “marginally successful” informant, mostly a comical figure who ducked behind newspapers whenever a stranger entered their office. They derisively called him “special agent double-oh-five” behind his back. They also criticized him for getting involved in a drug deal without their permission, then calling for their assistance when it got him into trouble.

From death row, Ogan wrote letters that were posted on an anti-death-penalty web site. In one of them, he claimed that his execution represented the “premeditated mass murder” of possibly thousands of his potential descendants. He also provided his version of the conversation between himself and Officer Boswell. In Ogan’s account, he was extremely polite, courteous to a fault, and non-confrontational. Boswell and Gainer, on the other hand, were hostile to him without provocation and called him a “[expletive] DEA snitch.” Ogan wrote that when he told Boswell, “All right, sir; I was only asking for help,” Boswell then threw his door open and burst out of the car “in an insane rage, running/lunging furiously right at me, like a football tackle gone berserk, and clawing frantically at his gun/holster.”

An anti-death-penalty spokesman who visited Ogan on death row described him as “extremely tense.”

Ogan’s execution was delayed for nearly an hour as the Supreme Court considered late appeals questioning his mental competence.

“I would like to say first of all the real violent crimes in this case are acts committed by James Boswell and Clay Morgan Gaines,” Ogan said in his lengthy last statement. “I am not guilty; I acted in self-defense and reflex in the face of a police officer who was out of control,” he said. Ogan referred to a head injury Boswell had suffered and suggested that he had mental problems. He described Boswell as “filled with anger” and “mad at the world.” The lethal injection was given while Ogan was two minutes into his last statement. At 7:05 p.m., he was still talking about Boswell when he paused briefly to collect his thoughts. The lethal drugs took effect as Ogan then snorted, gasped, and lost consciousness. He was pronounced dead at 7:13 p.m.

By David Carson. Originally posted on 20 November 2002. Revised on 5 December 2002.
Sources: Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Texas Attorney General’s office, U.S. Fifth Circuit Court documents, Associated Press, Houston Chronicle, letters from Craig Ogan.

Also On This Date

• 1928: Marshall Ratliff lynched for the Santa Claus Bank Robbery
• Themed Set: The "Ex" Stands for "Extrajudicial"
• 1915: Joe Hill

Letter to Thomas Cromwell from his man in Somerset,* Richard Pollard, a local gentry type making out well under the Dissolution of the Monasteries:

Pleaseth it your lordship to be advertised, that … the same 15th day [of November] the late abbot of Glastonbury went from Wells to Glastonbury, and there was drawn through the town upon a hurdle to the hill called the Torre, where he was put to execution; at which time he asked God mercy and the king for his great offences towards his highness, and also desired my servants then being there present to see the execution done, that they would be meane [communicate] to my lord president and to me that we should desire the king’s highness of his merciful goodness and in the way of charity to forgive him his great offences by him committed and done against his grace, and thereupon took his death very patiently, and his head and body bestowed in like manner as I certified your lordship in my last letter. And likewise the other two monks [John Thorne and Roger James, executed with Richard Whiting] desired like forgiveness, and took their death very patiently, whose souls God pardon.

And whereas I at my last being with your lordship at London moved your lordship for my brother Paulett, desiring your lordship to be a mean that he might have the surveyorship of Glastonbury, which I doubt not but he will use and exercise the said office to the king’s most profit and advantage, and your lordship’s goodness herein to him to be shown he shall recompense to his little power, I assure your lordship he hath been very diligent, and divers others by his means, to serve the king at this time, according to his duty and right…

the late abbot of Glastonbury, afore his execution, was examined upon divers articles and interrogatories to him ministered by me, but he could accuse no man but himself of any offence against the king’s highness, nor he would confess no more gold nor silver nor any other thing more than he did before your lordship in the Tower …

From Wells, the 16th day of November.

Your assured to command,

Rychard Pollard

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iantherev/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Once one of the greatest religious houses in England (and the legendary burial place of King Arthur), Glastonbury Abbey today is a picturesque ruin. Cornell University has published some 19th century photos of the abbey’s remains in a less manicured, more gorgeously overgrown situation.

Pollard had just a few weeks before exonerated the monastery of any profligacy, and the abbot seems perhaps not to have even been properly charged or attainted … but as one can discern in Pollard’s cloying appeal to keep the surveying position in the family, the practical henchman had no qualms as events unfolded about taking a commercial position on the end of the Abbot of Glastonbury.

For your public domain perusing pleasure: The last abbot of Glastonbury: and other essays, by Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet.

* Pollard had been in the thick of the destruction of Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter just the year before.

Also On This Date

• 1924: Daisuke Namba, for the Toranomon Incident
• 1949: Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's assassin

On November 14 and 15, 1726, more than 20 Gypsy outlaws of Hesse-Darmstadt

Detail view (click for full image) of the execution of the Gypsies at Giessen.

Gypsies in Europe still suffer ample discrimination today, so it’s little surprise to find early modern Europe thick with anti-Gypsy legislation.

No surprise, Angus Fraser writes in The Gypsies, this sort of thing

did in the end produce enormous changes in the life of the Gypsies in Europe. To survive, they had to adapt; they also had to make the most of the loopholes in a system which expressly sought, by denying them food and shelter, to make honest living impossible. Some found a degree of security in inaccessible waste-lands and forests. Some exploited differences in jurisdiction and the spasmodic nature of the authorities’ activity, by making a home in frontier regions … Many broke up into small groups when it was necessary to avoid attention; conversely, others gathered into larger bands to facilitate self-protection … sometimes resorting to violence. Certain Gypsy brigands gained notoriety in eighteenth-century Germany, large tracts of which were overrun with robber companies of mixed and varying origins. Some of these had a strong Gypsy element: numbering perhaps 50 or 100, armed and defiant, they stole for their sustenance and skirmished with the soldier-police sent to confine them.

“The poor Gypsies,” one poor Gypsy lamented to a contemporary German author,* “also want to have the right to live.”

Like the Gypsies’ other necessities, that right went as far as they themselves could secure it … and when secured by brigandage, it eventually brought down an overwhelming response.

The German author in question, J.B. Weissenbruch, relates the tale of a particularly notorious pack of Gypsy outlaws under the leadership of rough characters names of Antoine la Grave, aka “der Grosse Galantho” or “the Great Gallant”, and Johannes la Fortun, aka “Hemperla”.

These were no romantic Johnny Depp-esque Gypsies, at least according to Weissenbruch. Besides “their disposition to wandering, to idleness, to theft, to polygamy, or rather promiscuous license” — well, okay, sort of romantic — these went toe to toe with soldiery dispatched to corral them and had the chops to “take military possession” of a village for the purpose of exacting some corporal revenge.

We know where this ends up.

Though the Great Gallant escaped punishment,† Hemperla and 20-plus of his band (different sources quote slightly different figures) enjoyed the pleasures of the thumbscrew and the Spanish boot to secure confessions necessary to license their sentences. Some were hanged, others (including women) beheaded, and Hemperla and a few comrades were broken on the wheel.

* Cited here; regrettably, I have not been able to locate a browsable original of the Weissenbruch text.

** Same story in yet another Google books freebie.

† This German book says his rank got him off the hook, but he lost his head just the same in 1733.

Also On This Date

• 1817: Policarpa Salavarrieta, Colombian independence heroine
• 1226: Frederick of Isenberg

One hundred years ago today, Will James was lynched as a murderer in Cairo, Illinois.

“The Frog” or “The Froggie” was a black man implicated in the murder of a white girl, captured in nearby Belknap and

taken to the most prominent square in the city and strung up. The rope broke and the man was riddled with bullets. The body was then dragged by the rope for a mile to the scene of the crime and burned in the presence of at least 10,000 rejoicing persons. Many women were in the crowd, and some helped to hang the negro and to drag the body.

Part of the mob then sought other negroes. Another part, at 11:15 o’clock, after battering down a steel cell in the county jail, took out Henry Salzner, a white man charged with the murder of his wife last August, and lynched him.* (New York Times, Nov. 12, 1912)

Other pictures related to the Will James lynching are at the Without Sanctuary site here (images 41 through 47).

The grey lady’s dim view of this jubilant scene prompted a letter to the editor in defense — the author’s disclaimer notwithstanding — of the lynching, which paints a grim and striking portrait of the town where it occurred.

CAIRO’S NEGROES.

Former Resident Says They Are Spoiled by Coddling and Are a Menace.

As a former resident of Cairo, Ill., where I was the editor of a daily newspaper for three years, I crave a word, not in defense of the double lynching which occurred there a few days ago, but in explanation of it. Cairo, at the extreme southern point of Illinois, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, is peculiarly located. Across one river is Missouri; across the other is Kentucky, and Tennessee is only fifty miles away. Cairo thus becomes a buffer between the North and the South. It is probably the only town in the North which has a true race problem to deal with. … Out of a population of 13,000 in 1900, 5,000 of the inhabitants of Cairo were negroes. Of the 100,000 negroes in the State of Illinois 5 per cent are massed in this one little town. Aside from this, the floating colored population is unusually large, and Cairo, at some time or other, harbors most of the “bad niggers” from St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans. It is these whom citizens fear the most, and for whom the police are constantly alert. Murders by negroes either of white men or negroes are alarmingly frequent, but the murderer usually escapes either to Kentucky or Missouri, and is never heard of again. Thus crime after crime is recorded against the name of Cairo, with no recompense in the name of the law. On the other hand, there is hardly a time when there are not forty or fifty Cairo negroes in the Southern Illinois Penitentiary, all convicted of theft or burglary.

The white people of Cairo have always dealt indulgently with the negro. For years it has been the policy to keep two negroes on the small police force, and there have been negro Justices of the Peace. A negro physician once came near being elected a member of the Board of Education. While they pay but little taxes, the negroes are provided with three public schools. The Sumner was the first colored High School ever established in the United States. Yet this negro population, coddled as it is, is a constant menace to the town. No white woman dare venture outside of the house at night alone for fear of assault. Many outrages of which the world has never heard have been attempted. This is why, as Mayor Parsons says, the effect of the recent lynching will be “salutary.”

Altogether it is not surprising that a lynching took place in Cairo. The only wonder is that one did not take place long ago.

W.L. CLANAHAN
New York, Nov. 14, 1909

That electric arch and celebratory mob are now long gone from Cairo: in the century since Will James was butchered, Cairo, Ill., has withered — striken in part by its own poisonous legacy of racism. (Also by flooding from the adjacent rivers, the routing of transportation corridors elsewhere, and the general deindustrialization of the heartland.)

During the civil rights struggle as played out in Cairo in the 1960’s and 1970’s (more in this pdf), the town’s white business owners made a name for themselves by refusing to integrate their workforces in response to black boycotts … preferring to go out of business and/or leave town.

Cairo today is a near ghost town at one-quarter of its previous population, and generally appalling quality-of-life indicators.

* Salzner’s lynching occurred after midnight, according to the same article; hence, his absence from this article’s marquee.

Also On This Date

• 1887: Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel, the Haymarket Martyrs
• 1831: Nat Turner

On this date in 1845, husband-and-wife murderers Crawford and Lavinia Burnett (nee Sharp) danced a gallows jig built for two in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

The duo contrived with their son, John, to rob and murder a nearby recluse, Jonathan Selby, for the money he was thought to be hoarding.

The family the slays together, pays together.

Alas for mom, dad, and big brother, 15-year-old daughter Minerva shopped them.

John-boy was still on the lam at this time — he’d be caught soon, and hanged December 26 — but Lavinia and Crawford hanged together before a large crowd in the vicinity of the present-day Fayetteville National Cemetery.

It was the first recorded execution of a woman in Arkansas history, and would be the only such until the year 2000.

Among the ranks of the Burnetts’ illustrious if unsuccessful defense team was Isaac Murphy, who would go on to become a notable pro-Union pol during the Civil War (with a murky part in an infamous massacre of Confederate sympathizers), and subsequently became governor of the state during Reconstruction.

Also On This Date

• 1892: Jens Nielsen, the last in Denmark
• 1520: Stockholm Bloodbath

(Thanks to John Temple, author of The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates and journalism professor at West Virginia University, for the guest post. -ed.)

Barring a last-minute stay of execution, Khristian Oliver will be put to death late this afternoon.

(Update: Khristian Oliver has indeed been executed as scheduled. His likeness lives on in an altarpiece made by his father, an artist.)

In 1998, Oliver, now 32, shot and killed a man whose home he was burglarizing. Oliver’s guilt isn’t being questioned. The argument his attorneys and supporters are using to stave off his upcoming execution has to do with how the jurors in his case handled his sentencing.

An Oct. 15 story in The Guardian described the scene in the jury room this way:

A clutch of jurors huddled in the corner with one reading aloud from the Book of Numbers: “The murderer shall surely be put to death” and “The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer.”

Another juror highlighted passages which she showed to a fellow juror: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death.” (Apparently one of the same passages, Numbers 35:16, in fuller context.)

Juries debating this most difficult decision often reach for Biblical guidance, and there are no shortage of verses that relate to capital punishment, including the famous “eye for an eye” passage(s). Courts have ruled this improper, not because the Bible is a religious document, but because it is extrinsic evidence, meaning it was not properly introduced as evidence.

The same issue arose in the central case in my new book, The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates.

To write the book, I shadowed a North Carolina legal team for four and a half years as they fought to overturn the death sentence of a man named Bo Jones. The attorneys crisscrossed the back roads of North Carolina to track down and interview most of the jurors from the trial, two of whom chased them off their property. In the end, the attorneys found one woman who claimed that a Baptist minister on the jury had brought a Bible into the room and quoted passages from it.

In the end, this claim didn’t help Bo Jones. A federal appeals judge threw it out, saying his lawyers hadn’t proved that the Bible-quoting had influenced the jury’s verdict. But Jones’s attorneys had plenty of other arguments up their sleeves, while Oliver’s supporters seem to be putting most of their emphasis on the Bible argument.

It remains to be seen whether this will bewas not enough to spare his life.

Also On This Date

• 1941: Arndt Pekurinen, conscientious objector
• 1925: Sidney Reilly
• Themed Set: Spies

We meet people in these pages who go to the scaffold joking, or sarcastic, or cocksure.

Humans bear up to proximity of death with every psychological defense in the book, but even if surprisingly few die in naked terror, make no mistake this Halloween: there’s a reason the executioner is scary.

Shot Through the Heart

Habitual criminal John Deering had a date with a Salt Lake City firing squad this date in 1938.

If anyone should be nonchalant about being ripped open by bullets, it’s a guy who eschewed a prison sentence in Michigan and confessed to murder to get himself extradited to Utah to face capital murder charges — saying that he and the world would both be better off with him dead.

The 39-year-old put on a cool front, but how steady was he, really? In a weird experiment, Deering agreed to be hooked to an electrocardiogram that measured his heart rate during his last moments.

Here comes the science!

The heart of John W. Deering, holdup murderer, beat three times faster than normal just before he was put to death today by a firing squad in the state prison here. The unprecedented recording was termed valuable to heart disease specialists as it showed clearly the effect of fear.

An electro-cardiograph film, recorded with the condemned man’s permission, showed that Deering’s heart beat jumped from normal 72 to 180, although he appeared outwardly calm. It maintained that rate for the several minutes required to complete preliminaries for the execution.

When the doomed man was asked for a last statement his heart beat fluttered wildly, then calmed after he spoke until bullets ended his life. The heart beat stopped 15.6 seconds after the bullets struck, but he was not pronounced dead until two and a half minutes after the five shots rang out. (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1, 1938)

Still no cure for cancer.

This guy is obviously not to be confused with his tragic Hollywood contemporary of the same name.

Also On This Date

• Executed Today's First Annual Report: One Year of Dying Languorously
• 1793: The Girondists
• 1589: Peter Stubbe, Sybil Stubbe and Katharina Trump

On this date* in 1796, France enacted what was long held to be one of its most notorious miscarriages of criminal justice by cutting off the head of Joseph Lesurques.

Lesurques was taken for the one of a gang who had sensationally robbed and murdered a mail courier early in 1796, and on the basis of slight eyewitness testimony condemned to die. The only reason he was associated with the crime in the first place was because his friend had been mistakenly accused, and then released, and Lesurques accompanied him to the court to retrieve the friend’s papers where he was “recognized.”

Eyewitness testimony having juridical pull far in excess of its dependability,** this “recognition” was worth the man’s life.

The famous French Revolution executioner Sanson was still in the game at this point, and his grandson (not yet born at this time) used the family notes to pull together this quasi-firsthand account in Memoirs of the Sansons. It’s a tale familiar to any present-day wrongful conviction scenario, of bad evidence snowballing, a blinkered prosecutor intent on conviction, pettifogging appellate authorities, and grim, relentless bureaucratic momentum.

(The names the Memoirs render as “Courriol” and “Dubosc” are also given as “Couriol” and “Dubosc” in other sources.)

the instructing magistrate … instead of imitating the prudence of his Parisian colleague and trying to discover the truth, applied himself to the collection of proofs of the guilt of the prisoners …

Fifteen witnesses on behalf of the defence proved an alibi in favour of Lesurques, eighty-three others spoke highly of his well-known respectability; but their evidence went for nothing in opposition to those who, with singular pertinacity, maintained that Lesurques was one of those who had been seen lurking near the scene of the murder on the night when it was committed …

On hearing his condemnation, Lesurques, who had been firm and collected throughout the trial, lost his self-possession, and raising his hands to heaven he exclaimed:

“The crime which is imputed to me is indeed atrocious and deserves death; but if it is horrible to murder on the high road it is not less so to abuse the law and convict an innocent man. A day will come when my innocence will be recognised, and then may my blood fall upon the jurors who have so lightly convicted me, and on the judges who have influenced their decision!”

…

On the 9th of Brumaire, year 5 (October 30, 1796), my grandfather and father proceeded to the Conciergerie, and found the convicts in the hall, through which so many had passed during the Reign of Terror. David Bernard† was in a state of utter prostration; Courriol, on the contrary, was excited. As to Lesurques, he was as calm and fearless as ever. When he saw my grandfather, whose white hair sufficiently designated him as the chief executioner, he stepped up to him, and said, holding out a sealed letter:

“Citizen, I hope for the honour of human justice that your functions do not often compel you to shed the blood of a guiltless man; I hope, therefore, that you will grant the last request of a man who is about to suffer for what he has not done. Be good enough to keep this letter, which may hereafter contribute to the restoration of the honour of my wife and poor children, whereof they have been so unjustly deprived.”

While one of his assistants was cutting the unfortunate man’s hair, my grandfather read the paper Lesurques had just given him. It was a letter addressed to Dubosc, the man in whose place he was condemned. It ran as follows:

“To Citizen Dubosc.

“Citizen Dubosc, — I do not even know you, and I am going to suffer the death which was reserved for you. Be satisfied with the sacrifice of my life. Should you ever be brought to account, remember my three children and their mother, who are disgraced for ever, and do not prolong their agony. Confess that you are the man.”

…

All preparations were now concluded. Lesurques, of his own choice, was dressed in spotless white, symbol of his innocence. He was the first to take his place in the cart; Courriol followed him, and Bernard, who had fainted, was deposited on the straw. Then began the most dismal and extraordinary journey that ever was made from the Conciergerie to the Place de Greve. Lesurques and Courriol stood in front. At every turn of the wheel, Courriol exclaimed in a piercing voice:

“I am guilty! Lesurques is innocent!”

And for twenty minutes, that is during the whole way to the guillotine, he perseveringly repeated his awful protest against justice. The crowd was horrified, and there were few who did not believe the murderer who confessed his crime, but who proclaimed his companion’s innocence. Courriol again repeated his words at the foot of the scaffold with extraordinary energy and vehemence, and the thump of the knife but just covered his supreme shriek:

“Lesurques is innocent!”

…

The judicial authorities have perseveringly refused to recognise this flagrant miscarriage of justice. And yet the innocence of Lesurques was amply demonstrated a short time after his execution: all the real murderers of the courier of Lyons designated by Courriol were captured; Dubosc himself, whose fatal resemblance to Lesurques was the cause of the latter’s death, was taken and tried … he was executed just four years after Lesurques …

The Lesurques heirs were left paupers by the state’s punitive confiscation of the “bandit’s” effects; after a quarter-century (during which the widow died in a madhouse), they were at least able to recoup their material loss, but although repeatedly challenged, the conviction itself was never reversed.

Judicial and literary skirmishing over the Lesurques matter continued for decades, gradually forming into a general consensus (whatever the courts might admit) that the man was wrongly accused.

As a result, Lesurques remained a potent symbol of capricious criminal justice overreach throughout the 19th century and into the 20th: this 1874 reader, Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, has a full chapter on the case; a popular Victorian play titled The Lyons Mail was translated into a now-lost 1915 silent film and a 1931 talkie … albeit with a happy ending.

To a certain, inevitably well-represented, authoritarian demographic, any credence given to the self-evident proposition that wrongful convictions happen smacks of effrontery towards betters, and the Lesurques case was no exception … especially when paired with the coincident low ebb of public esteem for Power during the Dreyfus affair, which hit while The Lyons Mail was in vogue.

An advert insert in an unrelated 1903 book plumps a “Lesurques was guilty” position, riffing on the then-current Dreyfus controversy (”recent efforts in France to bring about the revision of a celebrated case”). This book is listed, but unavailable, on Amazon.com.

L’ affaire Lesurques never (so far as I can determine) reached a resolution; it simply faded away, 140 years or so after its namesake lost his head.

A late (1930) review of its particulars in the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology (”The Moving Story of the Lyons Stage,” by Max Radin of UC-Berkeley, May 1930) proceeds with ingenuousness embarrassingly unbecoming a professor of the law.

Judicial errors do not occur in the United States. [!!!] Under these circumstances, we can look with some satisfaction on times and places in which this happy condition did not prevail. If in the cycle of existences our perfection should ever become visibly tainted, it may happen that we shall hang men or electrocute them and subsequently regret the fact. Perhaps some one will then recall the moving story of the Lyons stage.

Sounds like it’s ready for a revival.

* A few sources say March 10, 1797, but the most and best clearly lean to October 30, 1796.

** “Juries have an unfortunate faith in the accuracy of eyewitnesses,” William Davis Gross observes. “The propensity for blunder is so great that it is nearly equal to all other forms of error combined.” (”The Unfortunate Faith: A Solution to the Unwarranted Reliance Upon Eyewitness Testimony,” Texas Wesleyan Law Review, spring 1999)

† Bernard is a footnote in the story, but he seems to have received a raw deal himself: he was the liveryman who procured the horses for the highwaymen, but did not participate in the crime. Sanson passingly refers to Bernard as “but slightly guilty.”

Also On This Date

• 2007: Not Earl Wesley Berry ... for the time being

On this date in 2008, during a record-setting year for executions, Japan hanged Michitoshi Kuma, 70, and Masahiro Takashio, 55.

Michitoshi Kuma attracts our notice in particular not simply because he insisted throughout his trial and appeal that he was innocent of abducting and murdering two seven-year-olds in 1992 … but because the circumstantial evidence that convicted him was buttressed by a DNA testing regime that has fallen into disrepute.

One crucial piece of evidence against Kuma was the DNA samples taken from blood near the victims’ bodies. The samples were tested with DNA typing of the MCT118 locus.

The same method of testing was used in the case of the murder of a young girl in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture, in 1990, known as the Ashikaga case. The test result was seen as crucial evidence in supporting the life sentence handed down to the accused, Toshikazu Sugaya.

However, the result was overturned when the DNA was tested again as part of the immediate appeal filed by Sugaya’s defense counsel after his request for a retrial was dismissed.

Sugaya, 62, was freed from prison on June 4, 17 years after police had arrested him.

“At first glance, DNA tests look scientific. That’s why it’s dangerous to have complete faith in them,” Iwata said.

“The tests were carried out in a particularly sloppy way in the early 1990s, when the Iizuka and Ashikaga cases occurred,” he said, adding that the Iizuka case likely was another example of a wrongful conviction.

“It can’t be undone now,” one of the defense lawyers lamented upon hearing of the hanging — conducted, as per usual in Japan, in secret and without prior notice to either the inmate or his attorneys.

The Ashikaga case, in which another prisoner convicted about the same time as Kuma and with the same DNA technology was exonerated and released a few months after Kuma’s hanging, embarrassingly reversed what had once been a signal judicial triumph for early DNA testing.

“The media treated the science as if it were invincible, like Atom Boy,” [one of Toshikazu Sugaya's attorneys] said sarcastically. “They just kept admiring the DNA judgment without reservations.”

The objections Sugaya’s exoneration prompted about Kuma’s conviction, of course, arrived a bit too late.

Also On This Date

• 1839: Sebastien-Benoit Peytel, notwithstanding Balzac

On this date in 1666, a hapless French watchmaker was hanged at Tyburn for starting the Great Fire of London — his obstinate confession in the face of all other evidence making him the convenient fall guy for an accidental cataclysm.

Of Robert Hubert Lord Clarendon would write,

though the Chief Justice told the King, ‘that all his discourse was so disjointed that he did not believe him guilty;’ nor was there one man who prosecuted or accused him: yet upon his own confession … the jury found him guilty, and he was executed accordingly. And though no man could imagine any reason why a man should so desperately throw away his life, which he might have saved, though he had been guilty, since he was only accused upon his own confession; yet neither the judges, nor any present at the trial, did believe him guilty, but that he was a poor distracted wretch weary of his life, and chose to part with it this way. Certain it is, that upon the strictest examination that could be afterwards made by the King’s command, and then by the diligence of Parliament, that upon the jealousy and rumour made a Committee, who were very diligent and solicitous to make that discovery, there was never any probable evidence, (that poor creature’s only excepted,) that there was any other cause of that woeful Fire, than the displeasure of God Almighty.

Executed Today is pleased to interview Meriel Jeater, curator of the “London’s Burning” exhibit now on display at the Museum of London, on what the Great Fire wrought.

More Great Fire images, including a map of the destroyed area, here.

Was London lucky to have the Great Fire?

Yes, I suppose so. Lots of people have sort of argued that London missed an opportunity to make more changes, but they just didn’t have the money to do them at the time.

There were a lot of improvements made. They widened the streets. The city was rebuilt in brick instead of wood, although that rule was in place from before 1666. The regulations were restated and extra ones were added in; a lot of people think that it was because of the Great Fire that people started building in brick, but that regulation already existed from earlier in the 17th century.

You’ve got acres and acres and acres of land that have been reduced to rubble during the Great Fire, and en masse, all these new buildings are going up. But yes, it made life more healthy & more pleasant in the city. You had pavement put in for the first time. All these little things you wouldn’t think of, like the houses had to have gassers for the first time, as opposed to just spouts that would spray water on you if you walked down the street. The Great Fire gave people the opportunity to get rid of all those inconveniences.

And they were able to do other things, like the slope down to the River Thames was quite steep, and they were able because of all the rubble to ease the slope.

How did it reshape London? What might have been different about the subsequent life of the city if it had never occurred?

Within days of the fire going out, various architects like Christopher Wren were supplying architectural plans to rebuild London, perhaps around an American grid plan, or European-looking piazzas.

What they really wanted to do was get people moving back into London and rebuilding their houses as quickly as possible, so they kept the medieval street plan and instituted new regulations, like the streets had to be widened, and they could no longer build the houses hanging into the street. The size of the house you could build was proportional to the size of the street you were on, so if you lived on a main boulevard instead of a small lane

Where’s the best place in London to catch a glimpse of that world, as it looked then?

It’s kind of a hidden thing because of course we were bombed in the Second World War, but there are places, like behind St. Paul’s Cathedral, in Amen Court.

So who is Robert Hubert?

He’s a French watchmaker from Rouen, and he was seized in Essex apparently attempting to flee the country. There were various other foreign people who were seized as well, but Hubert confessed to starting the fire.

But his evidence* was very conflicting; he kept changing his mind of what he’d done. He said he’d been part of 23 conspirators and put a fireball through the window of the bakery where the fire started. The baker himself said there wasn’t a window there.

The jury really thought that Robert Hubert was mad, but he was so insistent that he’d done it.

The following year, they discovered that he hadn’t actually arrived in London until two days after the fire started.

Lucky for the baker! He didn’t end up catching any blame for burning down the city?

Hubert was a very convenient scapegoat, and Thomas Farynor** of the bakery was incredibly relieved. Right from the start, Farynor had said “I put my oven out that night, it can’t possibly be me, it must be arson.”

I’ve had a little look at the records of Pudding Lane to see whether he rebuilt his house, and he did.

One of the interesting resources on your site deals with the going fear of “Catholic incendiarism” (pdf), and the use of the Great Fire as a touchstone for the succession conflicts of the 1680’s. Would it have been conventional wisdom by that time, a generation or so after the event, that the Great Fire was a Catholic plot?

It becomes all caught up in the contemporary politics of the time, so it’s really got nothing to do with the fire. It’s people not liking James II for being a Catholic. It’s the fictional Popish Plot, completely fabricated. It’s probably not a coincidence that at the height of the Popish plot that they put up the plaque on the side of the bakery saying that the Fire came from “the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists.”†

Given the combustible material all about, why wasn’t something like the Great Fire a more regular occurrence?

There were six serious fires in the 17th century before the Great Fire happened; one of them was a great explosion of gunpowder.

Fires were sort of a common hazard. The thing about the Great Fire was that there was sort of a whole load of circumstances. There was a drought, so it was dry; there were storm winds coming in from the east, so it blew the fire on faster than it would have; it started at 1 o’clock in the morning, so people were in bed. I think the problem is that it’s all these circumstances combining together. Maybe if it happened at 3 o’clock on Monday when it was raining, it wouldn’t have gone beyond the block.

Logistically, how did the society and the state handle the mass homelessness and unemployment that followed? Where did all these people live right after the fire, and how smoothly were they reintegrated?

People were camping out in the fields outside of London; others were moving into areas that were unburnt but having to pay hugely inflated rents. Some people had to move into other towns. There was evidence that people were still living in shantytown tented accommodations up to eight years after the fire, because there’s another rebuilding regulation in the 1670s that addresses that.

In the first year after the fire, only 150 houses are rebuilt; the rebuilding happens over 10 years, though some houses took up to 30 years. Some people were in very desperate circumstances, so formerly very wealthy people who had lived off their rents might now be working as servants. People coped, a lot of times in reduced circumstances from what they were used to.

There was a particular man you can read about in Samuel Pepys’ diary, and he threw himself into a pond in an attempt to commit suicide because he was so indebted.‡

As curator of an exhibit, what do you hope visitors take away from London’s Burning?

One thing that I really wanted people to understand as they go around the exhibition is the effect on people. You learn about it at school, but you don’t really focus on how people cope and how they rebuild.

There’s also a lot of urban myths about the Great Fire, like the ‘fact’ that the fire is supposed to have ended the Great Plague, which is not the case (pdf); those are things we wanted to dispel.

* There’s some original documentation from the examination of Hubert and others after the Fire here.

** Also spelled Thomas Farriner — or Faryner, or Farryner.

Christopher Wren’s monument to the Great Fire of London.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tgigreeny/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

† An inscription on the base of the Great Fire monument itself (only chiseled out in 1830), once read:

This pillar was set up in perpetual remembrance of the most dreadful burning of this protestant city, begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the popish faction, in the beginning of September, in the year of our Lord, 1666, in order to the carrying on their horrid plot for extirpating the protestant religion, and old English liberty, and introducing popery and slavery. (Soruce)

Alexander Pope savaged this civic pamphleteering with the couplet,

Where London’s column, pointing at the skies,
Like a tall bully, lifts the head and lies.

Poets and elites might think what they like, but Lord Clarendon recorded a popular anti-foreigner freakout as England reached

a universal conclusion, that this Fire came not by chance … the wicked authors … were concluded to be all the Dutch and all the French in the town, though they had inhabited the same places above twenty years. All of that kind, or, if they were strangers, of what nation soever, were laid hold of; and after all the ill usage that can consist in words, and some blows and kicks, they were thrown into prison. And shortly after, the same conclusion comprehended all the Roman Catholics, who were in the same predicament of guilt and danger … In the mean time, even they [the King's Privy Councilors], or any other person, thought it not safe to declare ‘that they believed that the Fire came by accident, or that it was not a plot of the Dutch and the French and Papists, to burn the City;’ which was so generally believed, and in the best company, that he who said the contrary was suspected for a conspirator, or at best a favourer of them. (Source)

‡ Pepys’ diary, January 21, 1668.

the story is that it seems on Thursday last he went sober and quiet out of doors in the morning to Islington, and behind one of the inns, the White Lion, did fling himself into a pond, was spied by a poor woman and got out by some people binding up hay in a barn there, and set on his head and got to life, and known by a woman coming that way; and so his wife and friends sent for. He confessed his doing the thing, being led by the Devil; and do declare his reason to be, his trouble that he found in having forgot to serve God as he ought, since he come to this new employment: and I believe that, and the sense of his great loss by the fire, did bring him to it, and so everybody concludes.

Although the man survived the drowning, he caught his death from the attempt and died in bed; Pepys intervened to see that the desperate suicide’s remaining estate would not be confiscated from his widow for his “self-murder.”

Also On This Date

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