Just after dawn this date in 1998, David Wilson was hanged for murdering a security guard in St. Kitts and Nevis.

Wilson was only the second person executed by the tiny Caribbean nation since it achieved independence in 1983, and he would be the last hanged there until 2008.

The execution of this run-of-the-mill criminal attracted particular attention as a hempen protest against death penalty skeptics on the bench of the British Privy Council. Especially in the 1990s (and since) the exercise by this high court of the commonwealth of an excessively persnickety supervision of Caribbean death sentences attracted regional backlash against colonial meddling for hampering local response to violent crime. (See also the contemporaneous Trinidad and Tobago case of Dole Chadee.)

Wilson was controversially hanged before he submitted his appeal to the Privy Council.

In a bid to shore up national sovereignty, Caribbean countries were even then hammering out a Caribbean Court of Justice to replace these distant and unaccountable magistrates. However, official adoption of the CCJ has been halting.

On this day..

• 1573: Lancelot van Brederode, sea beggar
• 1909: William Hampton, Cornwall ghost
• 1934: William Bayly, bad neighbor
• 1683: Andrew Guilline, Covenanter accessory
• 1768: Francesco Arcangeli, Winckelmann-Mörder
• 1934: Not Walter Lett, To Kill a Mockingbird inspiration
• 1780: John Gamble, anti-Wilmot
• 1813: Johann Christian Claudius Devaranne
• 1301: False Margaret, Norwegian pretender
• 1898: Choe Si-hyeong, Donghak leader
• 1889: "Cattle Kate" Ella Watson lynched
• 1514: György Dózsa, Transylvanian Braveheart