ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1663,* a husband and wife were hanged for witchcraft in colonial Connecticut.

Salem, Mass. gets the publicity — and the tourism — but it was actually the Constitution State where the colonies’ first witch hangings took place, only a few years after the earliest European settlements were established.

As in the Old World, witch purges in New England took place episodically. It had been nearly a decade since any (documented) witchcraft execution when the witch-hunt erupted in Hartford that would claim this day’s victims.

The persecutions began with the deathbed ravings of an 8-year-old girl, who accused a certain Goodwife of the town, the latter preserving herself only by escaping detention and fleeing the colony with her husband.

A familiar cycle of indictments, denunciations, and extracted confessions ensued, as narrated by a 19th century historian.

The reasons for witch persecutions have been extensively and inconclusively debated. As the indispensable Walking the Berkshires blog observes, “Feuds, gossip, and a culture that demanded conformity to rigid social norms certainly played their part, but these secular explanations are easier for us moderns to accept than the sacred, and the two were inextricably linked in 17th-century New England.” It is achingly pitiable to suppose that when Rebecca Greensmith denounced her husband in her confession, she might have been in earnest:

I speak all of this out of love to my husband’s soul, and it is much against my will that I am now necessitate to speak against my husband. I desire that the Lord would open his heart to own and speak the truth.

Nathaniel Greensmith did not “own and speak the truth,” but he shared his wife’s fate this day. They may have been executed with a third accused witch as well, but the documentary trail for Mary Barnes’ case seems less certain. Though she, and perhaps another woman, may have been hanged after the Greensmiths in this particular spasm of supernatural paranoia, the Hartford witch trials of 1662-63 would mark the last witchcraft executions in Connecticut.

The Greensmiths left behind 15- and 17-year-old daughters, a modest estate, and community lore of the miraculous post-execution recovery of the party they were supposed to have been afflicting.

Noted colonial pietist Increase Mather would subsequently retail this latter point further to the fraying credibility of witch-hunting:

After the suspected Witches were either executed or fled, Ann Cole was restored to health, and has continued well for many years, approving her self a serious Christian.

…

The instance of the witch executed at Hartford, considering the circumstances of that confession, is as convictive a proof as most single examples that I have met with.

David Hall’s Witch-Hunting in Seventeen-Century New England reprints many of the original documentary fragments relating to the Connecticut witch trials, as does an acerbic century-old volume in the public domain, The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647-1697.

* Sometimes recorded as 1662 or 1662/3, since January 1 was not the legal beginning of the new year.

Update: A resolution officially clearing Connecticut’s “witches” is being mooted., thanks to the pressure of 8th- and 9th-generation descendants of one of the victims. The bill expired in committee in 2008, but could come up again in future sessions. (Thanks to Melisende for the story.)

(Thanks to David Elliot at Abolish the Death Penalty for the guest post -ed.)

The strange case of Ricky Ray Rector, executed by the state of Arkansas on Jan. 24, 1992, is what many observers of the death penalty system in the U.S. might call a trifecta.

First, Rector was African American. Of course, African Americans are disproportionately represented on death rows in the U.S., compared with their representation in the general U.S. population.

Second, Rector was severely mentally impaired. More about that in a couple of paragraphs.

Third, Rector suffered from a botched execution. It took a team of five executioners 50 minutes to find a suitable vein in which to inject the lethal cocktail. During this time, witnesses heard continued moaning from the inmate. (The process of repeatedly jabbing an inmate with a needle, over and over and over again, might not seem as torturous as, say, garroting or drawing and quartering. But it can hardly be described as painless.)

Now, on with the story.

According to Wikipedia, on March 21, 1981, Rector and some friends drove to a dance hall at Tommy’s Old-Fashioned Home-Style Restaurant in Conway. When one of Rector’s friends was refused entry after being unable to pay the three dollar cover charge, Rector became incensed and pulled a .38 pistol from his waist band. He fired several shots, wounding two and killing a third man. The third man, Arthur Criswell, died almost instantaneously after being struck in the throat and forehead. Rector left the scene of the murder in a friend’s car and wandered the city for three days, alternately staying in the woods or with relatives. On March 24, Rector’s sister convinced him to turn himself in. Rector agreed to surrender only to Officer Robert Martin, who he had known since he was a child.

Officer Martin arrived at Rector’s mother’s home shortly after three p.m. and began chatting with Rector’s mother and sister. Shortly thereafter, Rector arrived and greeted Officer Martin. As Officer Martin turned away to continue his conversation with Mrs. Rector, Rickey pulled his pistol from behind his back and fired two shots into Officer Martin, striking him in the jaw and neck. Rector then turned and walked out of the house. Once he had walked past his mother’s backyard, Rector put his gun to his own temple and fired. Rector was quickly discovered by other police officers and was rushed to the local hospital. The shot had destroyed Rector’s frontal lobe, resulting in what was essentially a self-lobotomy.

Rector survived the surgery and was put on trial for the murders of Criswell and Martin. His defense attorneys argued that Rector was not competent to stand trial, but after hearing conflicting testimony from several experts who had evaluated Rector, Judge George F. Hartje ruled that Rector was competent to stand trial. Rector was convicted on both counts and sentenced to death.

When Rector’s execution day approached, he was given the standard last meal. For dessert, he was offered a slice of pecan pie, which he moved to the window sill of his holding cell. When asked why he was not eating his pie, he remarked that he was “saving it” for “after the execution.”

If there had been any doubt that Rector did not understand his impending fate, that sealed it. His execution proceeded nonetheless – this was, after all, Arkansas in the early 1990s.

If that were the end of the story, we probably would not be writing about Rector today. (Then again, given the nature of this blog, maybe we would.)

But, completely unbeknownst to him, Rector would enter the annals of American presidential politics.

Back in 1988, at one time, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis enjoyed a huge advantage in the polls over the Republican nominee, George H. W. Bush. Why he lost that lead is probably the focal point of another blog somewhere, but one reason is certainly due to The Question.

The Question came during a presidential debate between Bush and Dukakis when CNN Anchor Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis what his view on the death penalty would be if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. To this day, pundits remember Dukakis’ tepid, emotionless and altogether inadequate response.

Enter Bill Clinton, 1992 presidential candidate. Clinton interrupted campaigning in New Hampshire to fly home to preside over the execution of the mentally challenged Rector. (Such an act was not necessary legally – the execution could well have proceeded without the governor’s presence in the state. But Clinton wanted to prove that he was a “new” Democrat, tough on crime.)

History has not treated Clinton kindly for this calculated and callous act of political opportunism. In 2002, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

A date which ought to live in infamy for the Democratic Party is Jan. 24, 1992. That’s the day Ricky Ray Rector was executed in Arkansas while Gov. Bill Clinton stood by and did nothing. On that day in Arkansas, the Democratic Party also died. Its body is still with us, to be sure, but its heart and soul died 10 years ago.

There’s evidence this could be changing. Although no major Democratic candidate (sorry, Dennis) has come out against the death penalty, the fact of the matter is the death penalty, at least in Democratic circles, has lost its saliency as a political issue.

And that, at least, is a baby step.