Tag Archives: may 20

1987: Edward Earl Johnson, “I guess nobody is going to call”

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On this date in 1987, murmuring “I guess nobody is going to call,”* Edward Earl Johnson was gassed for capital murder in Mississippi’s Parchman Farm prison.

Don Cabana, the prison warden who oversaw Johnson’s gassing, eventually resigned over his misgivings about carrying out executions and wrote this book about it.

Johnson was convicted of raping a white woman and killing the policeman who answered her distress call. These are no-nos for a young person of color in the South.

Johnson fought his execution for eight years on death row, insisting on his innocence even on his last walk to the gas chamber.

And the case against him looks pretty thin — supported, as these things so often are, mostly by a highly suspect confession Johnson miraculously coughed up when he was out on a drive with John Law. (This led the victim, who knew Johnson and had excluded him as the attacker, to decide he did it after all.)

Needless to say, Johnson’s state-appointed public defender was unable to make the most of these gaping lacunae in the state’s case.

Years later, the prison warden Don Cabana — who was on this date overseeing his very first execution, and was deeply shaken by it — recalled his charge’s fearful situation in testimony to the Minnesota legislature:

He insisted to the very end, somewhat oddly, that he did not commit the crime … my experience with condemned prisoners was always that once strapped to the chair, they came around somehow with something, if only something simple as “Tell the victim’s family I’m sorry,” “Tell my mother I’m sorry,” something that indicated something bad had happened, I was there and I was part of it.

But not so with this young man. When I performed my ritualistic function of asking if he had a final public statement, this young man looked me in the eye with tears streaming down his cheeks, and he said: “Warden, you’re about to become a murderer. I did not kill that policeman, and dear God, I can’t make anyone believe me.”

This is a musty old case by now, but with the growing awareness of false confessions as a contributing factor in wrongful convictions, it may soon come in for a long-overdue re-examination.

Johnson, unfortunately, does not have any prospect of an a-ha forensic science win. However, as with Cameron Todd Willingham‘s case, there’s simply no balance of evidence that should point a fair-minded present-day observer to a conviction beyond reasonable doubt, and a good deal that points to an affirmative conclusion of innocence.

As the (admittedly partisan) Wrongful Conviction: International Perspectives on Miscarriages of Justice sums up,

[t]he murder weapon was never connected to Johnson; indeed, no physical evidence linked Johnson to the crime. The case against Johnson is weakened by his claim of inadequate counsel, his immediate recantation of his confession, and his claim that his confession was produced under threat of death. Also, after Johnson’s execution, a young woman came forward claiming to have been with Johnson on the night of the murder, and claiming also that she had come forward during the investigation but was rebuffed by police.

Edward Earl Johnson is the subject of the riveting BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May.

* Quoted in the New York Times, May 21, 1987.

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1897: Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling, Pearl Bryan’s murderers

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On this date in 1897, a remarkable scene unfolded at the double hanging of Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling in Newport, Ky.

Jackson was described as standing erect and playing the part of an actor. Walling trembled with his eyes downcast. At that point, Jackson was again asked if he had anything to say. An eyewitness said, “Jackson hesitated fully two moments before he replied. Before he spoke, Walling turned expectantly evidently believing Jackson would speak the words that would save his life, even while he stood on the brink of death. Walling had half turned around and he stood in that position with an appealing expression on his face, while Jackson without looking at him, upturned his eyes and replied, ‘I have only this to say, that I am not guilty of the crime for which I am now compelled to pay the penalty of my life.”

Walling was then asked if he had any comments. He said, “Nothing, only that you are taking the life of an innocent man and I will call upon God to witness the truth of what I say.”

At 11:40am the trapdoors opened and Jackson and Walling were hanged.(Source)

Jackson and Walling had been convicted the previous year in separate trials — each defendant accusing the other — for the murder of Pearl Bryan, a naive Greencastle, Ind. farmgirl who had gone in search of an illegal abortion and turned up headless.

The notoriously grisly case — the decapitated body was only laboriously identified by tracing a manufacturers’ mark on her shoes back to her hometown — precipitated a nationwide media frenzy, ordinarily an ephemeral phenomenon.

But this story had more legs than your average whodunit. Years later, tourists were still seeking out Pearl Bryan sites to gawk, and paying local hucksters to eyeball murderabilia.

(As was the style at the time, the Pearl Bryan slaying also contributed a murder ballad recorded by the Library of Congress. Close-enough lyrics here.)

[audio:Ballad_of_Pearl_Bryan.mp3]

But for the last public hanging in Campbell County, the crime beat couldn’t even scratch the surface of the weirdness.

Poor Pearl Bryan’s head, you see, was never found, and the culprits adamantly refused to divulge its whereabouts, prompting rumors of satanic ritual.

This occult connection (and the unsettled nature of a case with a head still at large) attracted paranormal associations.

Bobby Mackey’s Music World, a Wilder, Ky., honky-tonk, that opened more than 80 years after Pearl Bryan’s murder, is reputed to be haunted by her spirit and those of the men hanged for her death. (The actual connection of this building/site to Pearl Bryan or her killers is speculative at best, but to judge by the stories they tell about it, Bobby Mackey’s seems to be a spectral Grand Central Station. Don’t take it from me: a “ghost counselor” and the “President of the United States Psychotronic Association” both vouch for its spooky bona fides!)

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2001: Zhang Jun and his gang

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On this date in 2001, an infamous crime lord and 13 members of his gang were put to death in two Hunan Province cities.

Suave serial bank robber Zhang Jun had a reported 28 deaths on his conscience, including such underworld classics as forcing a lover to execute someone in order to prove her loyalty, in a years-long spree of robbery and mayhem. He was a major catch early in China’s execution-rich “strike hard” crime crackdown.

Despite-slash-because of the body trail, the cool Zhang — who appeared in court dressed modishly and flaunting such indifference to death that he disdained to defend himself — attracted a strain of fandom for his “gangland chic”.

He’s kind of like the gangsters in the movies, really likable.

The authorities, and his many victims, liked him less.


A still shot from the broadcast of Zhang Jun’s trial.

According to Courts and Criminal Justice in Contemporary China, the gang’s trial had the distinction of being the first ever broadcast live in China.

Zhang Jun’s trial was notable for its ripples in other media as well. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that several writers and editors were demoted or fired after publishing a story in Nanfang Zhoumo (Southern Weekend) exploring the gang’s roots in poverty and inequality … a take deemed inimical to the dialectical historical march of the Peoples’ Republic. (See here for some of the more approved commentary angles.)

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1820: Karl Ludwig Sand, a curious strand of German history

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Alexandre Dumas recognized the name of Karl Ludwig Sand, who lost his head on this date in 1820 in Mannheim, Germany, for the murder of the dramatist and humorist August von Kotzebue.

The assassination of von Kotzebue* worried the Prussian monarchy — then headed by Friederich Wilhelm III — and precipitated a series of proclamations, reforms, and internal struggles that finally led to a full-scale rebellion 30 years later.

A print showing Sand stabbing August von Koetzebue. Sand is reported to have shouted, “Here, you traitor to the fatherland!”

Sand was a member of a Burschenschaft,** a liberal student fraternity organization which appealed to nationalist Germans seeking a unified German nation-state, and he and others in his group regarded von Kotzebue as a plague on their cause. Von Kotzebue was then Councillor of the Russian Legation, the culmination of over a decade in the Russian civil service, and a spinmeister for the Russian regime. In 1816, while Sand was in college, von Kotzebue was tasked with managing the flow of information into the Prussian state in an effort to increase the monarch’s popularity in Germany.

At the very least, then, von Kotzebue had no love for the Burschenshaft movement from the start, which originated in the university town of Jena, and he did not hold back his criticisms in his weekly literature newpaper Literatische Wochenblatt. He casually disparaged the Burschenschaften, as this stab in the review of a novel in one of the earlier editions evidences:

Longing and love in the work is described in a way which, in the judgment of the Jenaer Recensenten, resembles a light Spring rain that is at least refreshing. That is more than one can say of the Jenaer Literature-Zeitung, which roughly resembles an autumnal rain that simply makes one wet without refreshing at all.

But the student organizations were on the rise during Sand’s time at university as a theology student, and the turbulent events in France during his final days in school were having ripple effects across the German populace. It was in this climate that a young man who was “distinguished at once by the gifts of the mind and the faculties of the soul” (as his Gymnasium rector put it) and who sought to become a pastor was drawn to the nationalistic movement. Sand’s opposition to the imperial rule of Prussia became increasingly more urgent after his studies, and he was determined to make a statement through action, eschewing what he called “simply writing and talking.” On March 23, 1819, the 22-year old found von Kotzebue in his house and stabbed him in front of several witnesses. Sand was quickly arrested and sentenced to death.†

A print depicting the Wartburg Festival of 1817, Burschenschaft colors prominently displayed. (Click for larger image.)

As a result of von Kotzebue’s murder, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich set down a series of decrees, known as the Karlsbad Decrees, which sought to quell any thoughts of rebellion before they could fully ferment. The decrees limited both university activity and press activity, constraining the actions of university employees and setting down harsh restrictions on anyone who might dare question the monarch’s authority.

Sand’s contemporaries outside of Germany were hardly pleased with the death of von Kotzebue, which they saw as the precursor to a greater turmoil, and two decades of removal from the event proved a powerful force. By the time Dumas visited the site of Sand’s beheading and penned his own biography of the man, a thorough rendering of Sand’s brief life — much of it reconstructed from Sand’s writings and the memories of those who knew him — the rebellion of the Burschenschaften was once again afoot, this time with permanent consequences for the German people.

In the end, nationalism and constitutionalism were not the panaceas Sand and other Burschenschaefter may have liked. While Sand would hardly have counted as a Nazi (his Puritanical theology would have fallen on deaf ears in that regime), he would have recognized that group’s near-religious fervor of the public book burnings anti pro-German sentiments as a distant echo of the Burschenschaft’s Wartburg Festival.†† Indeed, the so-called Third Reich could never have existed without the Second Reich, whose seeds Sand and his fellow nationalists were sowing a half century early when his fateful date with the axe arrived.

* The name is also spelled “Kozebue” by some sources.

** The Burschenschaften were roughly based on the Lützow Free Corps, an academic paramilitary group which fought during the Napoleonic Wars. During their height of popularity, the Burschenschaften adopted the black-red-gold flag that was reclaimed by the Frankfurt Parliament in 1949 to be the official German flag.

† In the end, Sand and von Kotzebue were buried at the same cemetery.

†† The Wartburg Festival, held in 1817, was a celebration of Martin Luther’s proclamation against the church. An interesting discussion of the appeal of such festivals to the students of the day is given in The Course of German Nationalism: From Frederick the Great to Bismarck.

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