(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. Fans of this here site are highly likely to enjoy following Elder’s own pithy, almanac-style collection of last words on the scaffold. -ed.)

A circled passage in the section “He Is Sentenced to Death,” in Plato’s Apology:

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

— James Dukes, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed August 24, 1962

Dukes was executed for killing Detective John Blyth Sr., who had pursued him after he had beaten his girlfriend in church and shot two other men who tried to stop him. On Dukes’s execution day, Detective Daniel Rolewicz, who took part in the final gun battle, told a newspaperman, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this night.”

Dukes made no oral statement but left behind a copy of the Apology for the press.

(Dukes was the last person executed in Illinois prior to the national death penalty hiatus of the late 1960s. He was also the last person electrocuted in Illinois, and the last put to death in Chicago’s Cook County. -ed.)

On this day..

• Feast Day of Saint Bartholomew
• 1217: Eustace the Monk, turncoat outlaw
• 1781: Beata Dolores, the last victim of the Spanish Inquisition
• 1811: Five at Shrewsbury, "but a ten minutes job"
• 1792: Arnaud de La Porte
• 1851: Samuel Whittaker and Robert McKenzie lynched in San Francisco
• 1290: Zavis of Falkenstein
• 1889: Auguste Neel, on St. Pierre
• 1782: David Tyrie, the last hanged, drawn, and quartered
• 1460: The residents of Amlas, impaled by Vlad Dracula
• 1751: Thomas Colley, witch-killer
• 1993: Ruben Cantu, an innocent child?