Category Archives: Crime

1930: Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, strange fruit

Posted on by

On this date in 1930, two black youths were lynched in Marion, Indiana for murdering a white man and raping his girlfriend.

(The rape allegation — although it, and not the homicide, seems to have been the thing that triggered the lynching — was subsequently withdrawn, and there were even rumors that the white girlfriend was a lover and confederate of one of the lynched men. It’s just one strand in the very human tapestry around the “last classic lynching north of the Mason-Dixon line” explored by Cynthia Carr in Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America.)

Thomas Shipp and Abram (or Abraham) Smith had been taken just the day before. The Chicago Daily Tribune (Aug. 8, 1930), for whom this event was banner news, reported that

Shipp, who is said to have confessed killing the white man, Claude Deeter, 23, of Fairmount, Ind., was hanged from an elm tree in the courthouse yard. Smith, whom the girl identified as her assailant, was thrown from a third floor window of the jail with a noose around his neck and strangled.

…

Reports of the crimes and confessions, published in Marion newspapers this afternoon, stirred this quiet community of 23,000 to intense excitement. There was no hint of the impending violence, however, until 8:30 p.m., when a motorcade of Deeter’s fellow townsmen arrived from Fairmount.

The Fairmount delegation, numbering about 100, gathered in the public square, openly displaying their guns and shouting for a lynching … The sheriff led his deputies to the front door, argued a moment with the leaders of the mob and then ordered the tear bombs thrown. Blinded, the lynchers fell back for a few minutes, but returned and began the sledge hammer siege which forced the jail doors within ten minutes. No shots were fired on either side.

Following the lynching the mob gathered in the square for an hour, some proposing to drive the 2,000 members of the Negro colony from the city and burn their dwellings. Peace officers from Indianapolis, Kokomo, Fort Wayne, and other towns were arriving however, and gradually the mob broke up.

The corpses hung in the square for hours, attracting throngs of gawkers — including a photographer able to snap this picture:

Teacher/poet Abel Meeropol ran across this photo of the Shipp-Smith lynching a few years later in a magazine, and it so “haunted” him — his word — that he penned the anti-lynching poem “Strange Fruit”. You know it from Billie Holiday‘s arresting vocal rendition.

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves
Blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
for the rain to gather
for the wind to suck
for the sun to rot
for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

Abel Meeropol was no passing sentimentalist himself, but a prolific left-wing activist. During the McCarthy years, he adopted the children of the Rosenbergs when the latter were electrocuted as Soviet spies. As faithfully as those two orphaned boys have carried the torch for their lost birth parents, they also still carry an adoptive surname: Michael Meeropol and Robert Meeropol.

A third person was almost lynched in the same Marion, Ind., incident, but 16-year-old James Cameron (sometimes called “Herbert” or “Robert” in the 1930 news reports) managed to convince the mob that he wasn’t involved. Just how he managed this feat and what he’d really been up to is another strand of Carr’s tapestry: many of the Marion blacks as well as whites she interviewed overtly mistrusted Cameron.

At any rate, the crowd let him off with a beating, and Cameron served time as an accessory to the crime.

After release, he became an anti-lynching activist in Indiana and, later, Wisconsin — where he founded a (since-shuttered) Black Holocaust Museum. He started several NAACP chapters.

Cameron was pardoned by Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh in 1993, and authored a memoir titled A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story.

In the more immediate aftermath, it was far from a given that this date’s effusion of summary justice wouldn’t cascade into a generalized racial pogrom.

As the Tribune article notes, the lynch mob mulled attacking the black community, ultimately dissuaded by the gradual arrival of lawmen. By the next day, the Indiana national guard had occupied Marion. The Tribune on Aug. 10 reported the town “peaceful to all outward appearances but acutely aware of an undercurrent of racial antagonism that it feared might flame into open warfare at any moment.”

Lest this seem a bit over-the-top, recall that all this went down just a few years since a lynch mob in Tulsa had metastasized into one of America’s most notorious race riots. The prospect of wholesale bloodletting was very real.

When the local attorney general and grand jury waved away the small matter of punishing mob leaders, several of whom were publicly known by name, Indianapolis attorney general (and Marion native) James M. Ogden drove up to town and personally filed indictments, to the fury of white residents.

“It was astonishing to see and feel the mob atmosphere that still prevailed nearly seven months after the murder,” wrote a correspondent for The Nation. Ogden’s deputies were “looked upon as enemies of the community, not only by the mob, but also by most of the court officials.” After all-white juries acquitted the first two people tried, the state dropped its remaining indictments.

The maelstrom of race and politics and history that emerged from that first fatal transaction — a brutal but banal Lover’s Lane heist — grew so far beyond the original cast of criminal and victim that they practically became secondary to the story.

On August 8, 1930, a wire story datelined Fairmount, Ind., ran in the Indianapolis Star (but not the Marion papers):

Deep regret that the negro slayers of their son Claude, were lynched in Marion last night by a mob, was expressed today by Mr. and Mrs. William Deeter, members of the Apostolic faith, a sect similar to the Quakers.

“God should have been the judge,” said the elderly Deeter. “They had no right to do it,” his wife assented.

Both are opposed to capital punishment and did not want to see the negroes put to death for their crime.

On this day..

1909: Georges-Henri Duchemin, matricide

Posted on by

On this date in 1909, Georges-Henri Duchemin was guillotined in Paris for murdering his mother. It was the first execution in that city in a decade.

An aimless gadabout, Duchemin mostly sponged off his dear mom, and the filial bond of nature proved insufficiently developed to restrain him strangling the old lady when she held out on him one time.

The ungrateful child made off with a couple hundred francs, but his sister knew right where to direct the police.

His lawyer bid to represent the killer as unbalanced (French link; most of the material on this criminal is in French). The general public horror of parricide and the undisguisedly mercenary nature of the murder made it a no-go.

France had taken a death penalty hiatus of three-plus years from late 1905 to early 1909, under the anti-death penalty president Armand Fallieres. But even those in the first half of the decade had been elsewhere than the capital: Paris hadn’t seen the national razor shave a head since Alfred Peugnez in 1899.


“[Juve] led Fandon just behind the guillotine, to the side where the severed head would fall into the basket. ‘We shall see the poor devil get out of the carriage, and being fastened on to the bascule, and pulled into the lunette.’ He went on talking as if to divert his own mind from the thing before him. ‘That’s the best place for seeing things: I stood there when Peugnez was guillotined, a long time ago now, and I was there again in 1909 when Duchemin, the parricide, was executed.-
–Fantomas

With the new death penalty era in the new century came a new location for the guillotine: just outside La Sante Prison. (The guillotine had formerly been stationed outside La Roquette Prison, but that facility had closed in 1900; today, it’s a park — but look sharp and you can still find the guillotine’s old support stones.)


Le Petit Parisien provided this map to curious onlookers as part of its vast Aug. 5, 1909 coverage of Paris’s biggest crime story of the summer.

On this day..

1882: Ham Yeatts

Posted on by

On this date in 1882, William Hamilton “Ham” Yeatts was hanged in Chatham, Va., for the murder of his friend Pressley Adkerson.

When a fellow lures you to a deserted stretch of rural train-track and pops a cap in your head, it’s a given that he’s nursing some manner of grievance.

In the case of Ham Yeatts, that grievance is said to have been a rivalry with Pressley Adkerson — really, we couldn’t make these names up — over the affections of the local knockout, Fanny Rorer. This here page claims that Yeatts, having just wed the girl, was aghast to discover that his friend had deflowered her premaritally.

But we take note of this report of the hanging in the Richmond Daily Dispatch to the effect that the provocation was merely the victim’s nasty prophecy that Yeatts was liable to end up in a penitentiary, the stronger cuckolding allegation arising as the doomed youth made a desperate play for clemency.

Yeatts’s hanging was delayed by a week when he raised these claims of offended manhood — resulting in a bid on his life by a lynch mob, “defeated of their laudable ambition by the alertness of the guards”* — but it was all to no avail.

He requested that he be executed in a blue flannel suit, and that his body be encased in a metallic coffin with a glass face and be placed in an upright position in a cemented grave with steps leading down into it so that those who wished to see him “lying in state” could do so.

So … add vanity to wrath, envy, and lust on Ham’s cardinal sins register.

After the execution the crowd turned their attention to the circus, which had just entered the town, and Yeatts and his crime were for the time forgotten.

Oh.

Though sometimes described as the last hanging in Pittsylvania County, it apparently wasn’t.

Yeatts was only one of four men hanged in various places around the U.S. that August 4, as the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle described in its next day’s edition …

FERNANDINA, Fla., August 4. — Merrick Jackson, colored, was hanged here to-day, at 1 o’clock, p.m. He murdered a colored boy, named John Thomas, near King’s Ferry, on November 19, 1881. On the scaffold he offered up a prayer, and thanked the Sisters of Charity for their kindness to him. He met his fate with composure. He died by strangulation.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., August 4. — Harrison Carter, colored, who murdered Lewis Adams, colored, at Baldwin, in this county, on January 6, 1882, was executed in the ail hard here to-day.

MOBILE [Ala.], August 4. — Armand Coleman, colored, was hanged, to-day, at West Point, Miss., for the murder of Georgia Bright, on May 13, 1880. He was sentenced to be hanged on May 4, 1881, and the case was carried to the Supreme Court, where he was resentenced, but respited by the Governor till to-day. Three thousand persons were present, a large number of whom were negro women. The prisoner ascended the scaffold with a firm step, smiling pleasantly. He said he was willing to go and trusted in God. He denied his guilt to the last.

It was not all the hangman’s day, however. Louisiana Gov. John McEnery respited the scheduled August 4 execution of Jack Chapman in Bossier parish. (Chapman still hanged, on September 22.)

* The Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago, Ill.), July 31, 1882.

On this day..

2007: Majid and Hossein Kavousifar

Posted on by

On this date in 2007, cousins Majid and Hossein Kavousifar (or Kavoosifar, or Kavoosi-far) were publicly hanged in Tehran for murdering a judge.

The judge in question had been noted for clapping some democracy activists in jail, but the authorities insisted that the case wasn’t political — that Majid admitted targeting Hassan Moghaddas (whose outsized portrait grotesquely decorated the scene) in a personal vendetta, as well as killing a couple of other people in a string of robberies.

The first public executions in the capital in five years, these hangings attracted an ample crowd, amply armed with the ubiquitous digital media equipment that characterizes our age.


Age-appropriate entertainment? A spectator at the hanging.

And while the 24-year-old Hossein died in fright, 28-year-old Majid played to those onlookers in the most insouciant execution pictures you’ll ever want to see.

Warning: Graphic images (and video) follow. (Many more can be searched up around the web.)

… and the inevitable video.

On this day..

1915: Charles Becker

Posted on by

On this date in 1915, New York City cop and New York City mafioso Charles Becker was electrocuted at Sing Sing for engineering a hit on bookie Herman Rosenthal.

This case of police corruption and gangland gunplay owned the Big Apple’s headlines in the early nineteen-teens — it even gets a callout in The Great Gatsby. Whether it was rightly decided has been hotly contested ever since.

Author Mike Dash, who maintains a dashing historical blog, delved into this Jabba’s Palace in Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Political Corruption and New York’s Trial of the Century. He was generous enough to grant Executed Today permission to excerpt Satan’s Circus for the narration of Becker’s last hours.

Sing Sing had already prepared for Becker’s death.

Invitations had been despatched in the middle of July to those chosen to witness the execution. There were three dozen in total, and they went to doctors and to a sanitary engineer, to representatives of the press, and to the operators of several wire services. One, scarcely surprisingly, was sent to Swope of the World, but the reporter — to his undoubted chagrin — was recuperating from a bout of rheumatic fever and his doctor had forbidden him to attend. Swope despatched another World reporter in his stead; the man arrived at Ossining bearing a large sheaf of handwritten instructions setting out in considerable detail exactly how the story should be covered. Preparations were also made to cater for the needs of the large body of newsmen expected to descend on Sing Sing without the benefit of invitations. Linemen spent several days installing additional telegraph wires and Morse code senders in a shack opposite the death–house.

Inside the condemned cells, white curtains were fitted across the bars of all the cells that Becker would have to pass on his way to the execution chamber, so that the other inmates would not be able to see him as he walked by. In the execution chamber, guards tested each piece of equipment. The lieutenant’s electrocution was scheduled to be the first at which a new system of signals would be used, as the New York Times reported:

Instead of the old method, by which the executioner signalled with his arm to the man in charge at the power plant, there is a little electric button behind the chair, and above it is tacked a placard bearing the following gruesomely suggestive instructions: “Five bells, get ready; one bell, turn on the current; two bells, turn on more current; three bells, turn on less current; one bell, shut off current; six bells, all through.”

New York’s newspapers remained predominantly hostile to the condemned man. The Times spoke for most of the Manhattan press when it observed that Becker’s death sentence was a punishment not just for Herman’ s death, but for the arrogance Rosenthal’s killer had displayed during his strong–arm days: ‘He paid for the times when “Big Tim” called him “Charlie”. He paid for his one–time power, that almost of a dictator, over the underworld of New York. And he paid for his pride in all this.’ Several dailies had issued their reporters with instructions to study Becker carefully for signs of weakness or incipient collapse; in the end, opinion seemed evenly divided between those who thought that the policeman continued to display an ‘iron nerve in the face of doom’ and those who discerned the onset of a nervous breakdown.

The lawyers were more generous. [Williiam] Bourke Cockran paid tribute to his client’s astounding self–control: ‘His hand is just as cool and his voice as steady as can be.’ John McIntyre said that he had never previously doubted the verdict of a jury in a murder trial. ‘But in this case I say that if Becker is executed tomorrow I will carry to my grave the conviction that at least one innocent man has suffered the death penalty.’ And Joseph Shay, another of the lieutenant’s old attorneys, released a statement of his own: ‘I believe that Becker is dying a martyr, and that his innocence will be established in time, perhaps by the deathbed confession of Vallon or Webber. Rose is too low to confess even on his deathbed.’

Becker himself was woken early on his last morning. At 8am his prison clothes were exchanged for special black cotton shirt and trousers, made without metal buttons or wire stitching; he was given black felt slippers instead of shoes. A guard shaved a spot on his temple, ready for the electrode. Another appeared carrying a pair of shears and neatly slit Becker’s trouser leg almost to the knee. When the time came this would allow the death–house guards to affix a second wire to the condemned man’s calf.

The next portion of the day was passed in writing: a love letter for his wife, a final statement for the press. At two in the afternoon the policeman saw his relatives for the last time. His brothers John, the detective, and Jackson, now a Wall Street broker, found him sitting in his cell, gazing at a small photograph of Helen that he kept on the wall. The meeting was so difficult that the two men were relieved when one of the other prisoners along death row broke the awkward silence by singing ‘Rock of Ages’. Becker joined in with the chorus.

Helen Becker reached Sing Sing, pale and breathless from her journey, soon after 11pm. Her husband had been waiting for her with increasing anxiety for most of the evening. Becker was so popular in the death–house that he had received special permission to spend more than an hour and a half with his wife in the warden’s room. The guards, who had been given strict instructions to keep their eyes on the prisoner at all times, turned their backs as the couple embraced for the final time. ‘No condemned man at the prison had ever had such sympathetic treatment,’ observed the World.

Helen left the prison at 1.30 in the morning, and Becker was returned to his cell. ‘I am tired of the world and its injustice to me,’ he told Father Curry, the New York priest. ‘My happy life has been ruined; I have not been given a chance a mere dog would get.’ Warden Osborne, coming to say good-bye at 2.30am, found his prisoner awake and sitting on the edge of his cot, ‘his chin sunk in his hands’. At four, Father Cashin heard Becker’ s last confession, which contained no admission of guilt and ended with the firm assertion: ‘I am sacrificed for my friends.’

The execution was set for 5.45am. Outside the walls, a double line of guards poked long sticks through the fence that marked the limit of the prison grounds to keep back the crowds assembling there. Inside, the executioner – a small, sharp-faced, balding electrician dressed in a baggy grey sack suit, a striped shirt, polka–dot tie and pointed patent leather shoes – checked his equipment for the final time.

Becker was the one hundred and sixteenth prisoner to die at Sing Sing since electrocution was first used to execute a man in August 1890. The victim on that occasion had been an axe-murderer named William Kemmler, who was accidentally subjected to ‘a far more powerful current than was necessary’ and died ‘in convulsive agony’, flames jetting from the base of his spine and purplish foam spewing from his lips. The technique for electrocuting a man had been refined somewhat since then, but it was still common for the death-house to fill with the odour of burning flesh and scorched hair as the moistened electrical conductors placed against the condemned man’s skin dried out. A lengthy electric shock could ‘turn blood into charcoal and boil a brain’. When a prisoner was ready to enter the chamber, he was issued with thick muslin underwear, and little wads of cotton would be forced into his ears and nostrils to prevent scalding brain fluids spurting forth uncontrollably when the current was applied.

Thomas Mott Osborne, who had vowed never to be present when a man in his charge was being executed, walked away from the death–house at 5am, leaving Deputy Warden Johnson to bring the policeman from his cell. Becker, who was still awake when Johnson came for him, went quietly to his death. A dozen steps took him from his cot to the door leading to the execution chamber. At 5.42 the witnesses clustering inside saw a narrow red door swing open, and the condemned man entered the room. He walked with a strange, hobbled gait, his knees locking involuntarily. His face was a mask. The chair, surprisingly insubstantial, stood on a thick rubber mat almost in the centre of the room. There was no glass and no partition to separate Becker from the witnesses who had come to watch him die, the nearest of whom sat only 10 feet away. The electric chair itself, the man from the American observed, ‘had had a double coat of varnish and its metal fixtures had been burnished for the occasion.’ Straps dangled loosely from its arms and legs, and a heavily–insulated wire hung from a goose-necked fixture above it. The policeman’s guards, anxious to spare the condemned man the agony of a lengthy wait, hurried so much with the buckles that they neglected to secure one of the restraints that stretched over his chest. Becker’s last words, uttered as another leather strap was fastened across his mouth, were a recitation of the Catholic litany: ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.’

Five bells rang, then one. The executioner took his hands out of his pockets and threw a long wooden lever on the wall. The raucous drone of electricity filled the room, a green flash shot from the equipment and Becker’s muscular body lurched forward against the straps, his head twisting sideways and upwards as though attempting to escape the shock.

Charley Becker was the largest man ever brought into the execution chamber at Sing Sing, and it may be for this reason that his electrocution was horribly botched. Too little current was applied at first, so that the death agonies became protracted. The temperature within the dying man’ s body rose to 140 F, the loose strap across his chest burst open, flames were seen to spurt from his temple, and despite the administration of 1,850 volts for a full 60 seconds, Charles Farr, the death–house doctor, found Becker’s heart ‘not only still beating, but pounding strongly.’ In the end it took nine minutes and three separate jolts to kill the prisoner, though the representative of the World observed that ‘to those who sat in the grey-walled room and listened to the rasping sound of the wooden switch lever being thrown backward and forward, and watched the greenish-blue blaze at the victim’s head and feet and the grayish smoke curling away from the scorched flesh, it seemed an hour.’ The whole affair was described in later years as ‘the clumsiest execution in the history of Sing Sing.’

As the reporters gathered to witness the execution filed out of the chamber, they were handed copies of Becker’s final letters. The first was addressed to Governor Whitman:

You have proved yourself able to destroy my life. But mark well, Sir, these words of mine. When your power passes, the truth about Rosenthal’s murder will become known. Not all the judges in this State, nor in this country, can destroy permanently the character of an innocent man.

The second letter was a final testament. Becker had spent much of the night memorising it, in the hope of being allowed to deliver it himself, but the guards had not permitted this.

‘I stand before you,’ this statement began,

in my full senses knowing that no power on earth can save me from the grave that is to receive me, and in the presence of my God and your God I proclaim my absolute innocence of the crime for which I must die. You are now about to witness my destruction by the State … And on the brink of my grave, I declare to the world that I am proud to have been the husband of the purest, noblest woman that ever lived, Helen Becker. This acknowledgement is the only legacy I can leave her. I bid you all goodbye. Father, I am ready to go.

CHARLES BECKER

When most of the reporters had left, Becker’s corpse was removed to the autopsy room for the usual examination, arms dangling, head hanging back, legs swinging. Dr Farr stripped the black cotton shirt from the lieutenant’s hulking body, and was startled to discover that it concealed the little photo of Helen that Becker had kept on the wall of his cell. The dead man had pinned it to his undershirt, with the face turned inward, over his heart.

I have no idea.

On this day..

Unspecified Year: Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Posted on by

On an unspecified July date in an unspecified late-19th century year, the title character of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles was hanged for murder.
Recent film adaptations of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The book is available free from Gutenberg.org.

The heroine, “goodness made interesting” — or “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented,” in the words of the subtitle — has been torn between the man she loves, Angel Clare, and one she loathes, Alec d’Urberville. Alec’s early, unwelcome attentions lead him to forcibly deflower young Tess, and the revelation that she is not a virgin ultimately shatters her prospectively happy marriage to Angel.

Years later, Angel returns from seeking his fortune in Brazil to find Tess miserably wed to her onetime rapist. But no sooner has Tess sent Angel away than she chases him down in the streets of Sandbourne.

“Angel,” she said, as if waiting for this, “do you know what I have been running after you for? To tell you that I have killed him!” A pitiful white smile lit her face as she spoke.

“What!” said he, thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she was in some delirium.

“I have done it — I don’t know how,” she continued. “Still, I owed it to you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through me. He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more.”

The two flee together overland, intending to wait out the search that must pursue them and slip away to a ship. They have a few days’ idyllic refuge in an abandoned house, and at once blissful and tragic, Tess foreshadows her fate:

“I fear that what you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me that you despised me.”

Finally forced to move on, they cinematically take their rest at Stonehenge — Tess literally sleeping on an altar.


One of the illustrations of the original serialized version of Tess.

There they are captured — on a pagan shrine, their love long frustrated in its licit form, at last fulfilled on the lam. (“Fulfillment” is the title of the novel’s last section.)

Hardy wastes no words on his heroine’s travail with the judiciary, which is merely inexorable.

The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses had almost dried off for the season their integument of lichen, the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and from the mediæval cross to the bridge, that leisurely dusting and sweeping was in progress which usually ushers in an old-fashioned market-day.

From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every Wintoncestrian knows, ascends a long and regular incline of the exact length of a measured mile, leaving the houses gradually behind. Up this road from the precincts of the city two persons were walking rapidly, as if unconscious of the trying ascent — unconscious through preoccupation and not through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this road through a narrow, barred wicket in a high wall a little lower down. They seemed anxious to get out of the sight of the houses and of their kind, and this road appeared to offer the quickest means of doing so. Though they were young, they walked with bowed heads, which gait of grief the sun’s rays smiled on pitilessly.

One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding creature — half girl, half woman — a spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes — Clare’s sister-in-law, ‘Liza-Lu. Their pale faces seemed to have shrunk to half their natural size. They moved on hand in hand, and never spoke a word, the drooping of their heads being that of Giotto’s “Two Apostles”.

When they had nearly reached the top of the great West Hill the clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a start at the notes, and, walking onward yet a few steps, they reached the first milestone, standing whitely on the green margin of the grass, and backed by the down, which here was open to the road. They entered upon the turf, and, impelled by a force that seemed to overrule their will, suddenly stood still, turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense beside the stone.

The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In the valley beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing as in an isometric drawing — among them the broad cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St Thomas’s, the pinnacled tower of the College, and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine’s Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.

Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of the other city edifices, a large red-brick building, with level gray roofs, and rows of short barred windows bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by its formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible enough up here. The wicket from which the pair had lately emerged was in the wall of this structure. From the middle of the building an ugly flat-topped octagonal tower ascended against the east horizon, and viewed from this spot, on its shady side and against the light, it seemed the one blot on the city’s beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not with the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.

Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.

Among the numerous potential inspirations for the character of Tess was a woman we have already met in these pages: Elizabeth Martha Brown, an battered wife who slew her husband. The teenaged Hardy saw her publicly executed one rainy morning in Dorset in 1856.

On this day..

1994: Glenn Ashby, abruptly

Posted on by

On this date in 1994, Glenn (or Glen) Ashby was hastily hanged at Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.

Ashby’s strange and internationally condemned (pdf) case was a milestone en route to the creation of the Caribbean Court of Justice.

Constrained by a 1993 legal decision from the British Privy Council — still the court of final appeal for Commonwealth Caribbean countries — to the effect that death-sentenced prisoners who awaited execution for more than five years were inherently being subjected to “cruel and inhuman treatment,” Trinidad raced to hang Ashby before his five years ran out. Since Ashby had been sentenced on July 20, 1989 (he stabbed a guy to death during a burglary) that newly-discovered deadline was practically on top of them.

Ashby’s date with the hemp was scheduled for July 14, but his lawyers appealed to the Privy Council. However, in spite of an undertaking by Trinidad and Tobago Attorney General Keith Sobion that the execution would wait on the Council’s ruling, Ashby was hurried to the gallows around 6:30 a.m. Minutes later, word arrived that the Privy Council had actually granted the stay.

Needless to say, hanging a fellow while his appeal was still pending got some legal briefs in a twist.

“I’m disgusted that a country can sign international human rights law and then execute one of their citizens while an appeal is still pending,” death row barrister Saul Lehrfreund total The Guardian.* “From the information I have, this is a summary execution, it’s judicial murder.”

Most Trinidadians felt otherwise when it came to Ashby’s hanging.

And indeed, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council, and especially its reluctance to sanction capital punishment, became particularly controversial in the region during the high-crime 1990s; a similar execution hurried to circumvent the body took place in St. Kitts and Nevis, with similar post-hanging recriminations.

This perceived overseas meddling in local criminal justice helped bring about the creation of the Caribbean Court of Justice as a potential alternate court of last resort. But in the decade since its putative establishment, actual full-on adoption of the CCJ continues to lag: even though the court is actually based in Port of Spain and has judges from Trinidad and Tobago, that country has still not replaced the Privy Council with the CCJ as a court of final appeals.

(The CCJ also handles regional treaty disputes, but overall has “a paltry case load”.)

* July 15, 1994.

On this day..

2010: William Garner, arsonist

Posted on by

(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 2010, at 10:38 a.m., at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, convicted arsonist and quintuple murderer William L. Garner got the needle for the crimes he had committed eighteen years earlier.

Garner had burglarized the Cincinnati, Ohio apartment of Addie F. Mack on January 26, 1992, after he stole her purse and keys while she was being treated in a hospital emergency room.

After taking some electronics, Garner set three fires within the residence, although he knew there were children asleep inside it. Markeca Mason and Richard Gaines, both 11, Denitra Satterwhite, 12, Deondra Freeman, 10, and Mykkila Mason, 8, all died of smoke inhalation. Addie Mack’s oldest child, 13-year-old Rodriczus Mack, escaped through a window; he was the only survivor.

Rodriczus, Denitra, Deondra and Mykkila were siblings, and Markeca was their cousin. Richard was a friend of Rodriczus who happened to be spending the night.

Thanks to a tip from an observant taxi driver, Garner was arrested the next day and quickly confessed. He considered the children’s deaths to be “accidental” because he only set the fires to obliterate his fingerprints and he believed the children would smell the smoke and be able to get out in time.

Unfortunately, the apartment’s smoke detector was inoperable.

Garner was nineteen years old at the time of the murders. He had a criminal record dating back to age eleven, and following his January 1992 arrest he racked up thirteen behavior infractions in prison … including a fire-setting incident.

A psychologist who interviewed him said he functioned at the level of a 14-year-old, and his IQ tested at 76, barely above the juridical cutoff mark for mental retardation. When asking for clemency, Garner’s attorneys cited these factors as well as his “extremely violent and dysfunctional” upbringing, and also argued that he was brain-damaged due to lead poisoning.

In June 2010, the parole board voted unanimously to reject Garner’s clemency request, stating in its report, (pdf)

Considerable weight was afforded the considerable mitigation presented. It is clear that Mr. Garner suffered developmentally and was raised in an exceptionally and horrendously abusive environment. However, we cannot conclude that the mitigating factors are significant enough to outweigh the aggravating circumstances of an offense resulting in the death of five innocent children.

Garner was executed a month later, using Ohio’s recently-adopted “one-drug” lethal injection protocol (most states use, as Ohio had previously, a cocktail of three). It didn’t go smoothly.

A Toledo Blade article provides a detailed account of his last moments. The prison had to open a second viewing room to fit all the people who came to watch him die.

On this day..

2006: Rocky Barton, suicidal

Posted on by

On this date in 2006, Ohio murderer Rocky Barton died by lethal injection for murdering his wife.

Say this for Barton: the experience of failed marriages had not jaded him on the institution. When his fourth wife, Kimbirli Jo, proposed to leave him, he was distraught enough to shoot her dead in a fit of passion, and then turn the gun on himself, too. “I couldn’t stand the thought of living without her,” he explained.

And say this, too: he wasn’t one for any special pleading.

“”It was an act of anger. Evidently it was not too thought out or I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he told a reporter just days before his execution. “I strongly believe in the death penalty. And for the ruthless, cold-blooded act that I committed, if I was sitting over there [in the jury box], I’d hold out for the death penalty.”

Voluntarily dropping his appeals, he spent less than three years on the “greased lightning” track to the Ohio gurney, only some 42 months overall from murder to execution. Kimbirli’s daughter, and Rocky’s stepdaughter, got a special release from a county jail where she was serving a drug sentence to witness the execution.

His suicide attempt, though unsuccessful, required “four surgeries to insert pins, wires and screws to hold his eyes in their sockets and the cadaver’s jaw to replace his shattered one,” and hundreds of thousands in public expenses to post special guard details for said reconstructive surgeries.

On this day..

1938: Anthony Chebatoris, in death penalty-free Michigan

Posted on by

This post was contributed by Andrew Gustafson, a writer and cartographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Andrew’s work can be found on his website, and he regularly blogs about New York City history and culture for Urban Oyster Tours.

On this date in 1938, Anthony Chebatoris was hanged at the federal prison in Milan, Michigan, becoming the only person executed in Michigan since it gained statehood in 1837.

Chebatoris and an accomplice, Jack Gracy, rolled into Midland, Michigan on September 29, 1937, with the intention to rob the Chemical State Bank. They never did get their hands on the cash, and only one of them would leave the town alive, though with a proverbial noose dangling from his neck. The two men, armed with a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun, entered the bank and approached the bank manager, Clarence Macomber, with guns drawn. In the ensuing scuffle, Chebatoris shot Macomber and another bank employee, Paul Bywater. Upon hearing the shots, Frank Hardy, a dentist whose office was next to the bank, grabbed the loaded deer rifle he kept handy and went to the window to see what the commotion was about. As Chebatoris and Gacy abandoned the botched robbery empty-handed, Hardy began firing at the fleeing robbers, hitting Chebatoris in the arm and causing him to crash the getaway car he was driving. As the wounded men looked for another escape route, Chebatoris spotted a uniformed truck driver named Henry Porter, whom he mistook for a police officer, and shot him. The men then tried to hijack a truck to make their escape, but as Gacy attempted to climb into the cab, the sharpshooter Hardy shot him in the head from 150 yards away, killing him instantly.* Chebatoris took off on foot and was apprehended a short distance away, exhausted and bleeding.

Chebatoris would survive his injuries, as would the bank employees Macomber and Bywater. But the innocent bystander Henry Porter put our convict on the road to the gallows: after two weeks in the hospital, Porter would succumb to his injuries, and murder would be added to the charges against the surviving bank robber. Michigan had outlawed the death penalty for murder in 1846, becoming the first U.S. state to do so. But Chebatoris found himself subject to a legal system that had been changed by New Deal politics and the public’s panic over escalating violence and criminality. Federal prosecutors took on the case, under the authority of the National Bank Robbery Act of 1934, which was passed in response to the rash of bank holdups across the country. The law gave the federal government the authority to prosecute anyone involved in the robbery of a bank that was a member of the Federal Reserve System or the newly created Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Unluckily for Chebatoris, Chemical State Bank was a member of both.

With a mountain of evidence against him, Chebatoris was easily convicted, and on November 30, 1937, he was sentenced to death by federal judge Arthur Tuttle. The case set off a political controversy in Michigan, one that would pit an anti-death-penalty governor against federal judges and prosecutors who wanted the sentence passed down and carried out in the state. Under the federal statute, federal death sentences could only be carried out in states that had their own death penalty. While Michigan had long abolished capital punishment for murder and other crimes, it still kept an obscure law on the books allowing execution for treason (which has never been exercised, as it is unclear how one would commit treason against the state of Michigan). This loophole allowed the federal capital prosecution and execution to proceed within the confines of the staunchly abolitionist state.

In response to the decision, Michigan Governor Frank Murphy said, “There hasn’t been a hanging in Michigan for 108 years. If this one is carried out in Michigan, it will be like turning back the clock on civilization.” Illinois, which had its own electric chair, offered to finish off Chebatoris, but Judge Tuttle ordered that the execution should proceed in Michigan, noting, “The just verdict having been returned, the law was mandatory in the three respects, namely that the penalty should be death, that it should be hanging, and that it should be within the state of Michigan. These last two requirements resulted from the fact that Michigan has one statute providing for the death penalty by hanging. If the sentence had been different in any one of these respects, it would have been unlawful. I have neither the power nor the inclination to change the sentence.”

Chebatoris was transferred from the Saginaw County Jail, where he had been held throughout his trial, to the federal prison in Milan. At 5 a.m. on July 8, 1938, he was brought to the gallows, and before 23 witnesses, including an inebriated hangman named Phil Hanna, he was hanged. In the middle of the night before the execution, Hanna had arrived at the prison demanding that his three drunken friends be admitted to the hanging. After an argument with the warden and a call to the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Hanna was allowed to proceed with execution, and the warden acceded to his demands (though at the time of the execution, the warden barred the three friends from the proceedings, knowing that the room was too dark, and Hanna too drunk, for him to notice their absence).**

Chebatoris’ execution was both a unique event and a bellwether for things to come in the federal death penalty system. Since 1927, he is the only person to be executed for a murder committed in a state that does not have its own death penalty statute. After World War II, executions, both federal and state, went into a steep decline across the United States, culminating in the 1972 Supreme Court decision Furman v. Georgia, which struck down every capital punishment statute in the land. Four years later, the death penalty was revived in Gregg v. Georgia, and it took barely six months for states to resume executions. The federal government was slower, however, and the first post-Furman federal death penalty statute did not appear until 1988. Since that date, however, we have seen the steady expansion of the federal death penalty, building on the precedents set by the National Bank Robbery Act. Rather than targeting bank robberies, the federal government has used the death penalty to take aim at other perceived scourges, employing it is a weapon in the various domestic “wars” on crime, drugs, and terrorism.

In the past twenty years, the federal death penalty has been transformed from a seldom-used punishment for pirates and crimes committed in the territories to an expansive weapon that can be imposed in a wide range of jurisdictions, leading the Criminal Defense Network to conclude that “virtually every homicide occurring within federal jurisdiction is now death-eligible.”† The greatest expansion of the federal death penalty came with the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which greatly expanded federal jurisdiction and authorized the death penalty for nearly 60 different crimes. And the reach of the federal death penalty has continued to expand, even into states like Michigan that have rejected capital punishment.

There are currently 58 people sitting on the federal death row, nine of whom committed their crimes in states that either do not have a constitutionally valid state death penalty statute or have active moratoriums on the death penalty.‡ Interestingly, all of those nine were sentenced to death during the tenures of Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, and their decisions to pursue capital prosecutions marked a departure from the actions of their predecessors. Early in his term, John Ashcroft revised the U.S. Attorneys Manual and removed language about the Department of Justice’s policy towards seeking the death penalty in states that did not have their own capital punishment statutes. Previously the manual stated that in these states, “penalty-driven decisions to file federal charges are inappropriate.” That language was removed, and presumably this opened the door for the increase in prosecutions, convictions, and death sentences handed out in federal districts located within abolitionist states. Since Chebatoris’ execution, no one who falls into this category has been executed, and current Attorney General Eric Holder has signaled a return to the earlier practices, meaning the federal government will be less inclined to pursue these kinds of cases. Nevertheless, it is likely that at least one of these nine will eventually be executed.

When that happens, Anthony Chebatoris will no longer be a solitary historical footnote.

* Hardy was a hero, but he is not nearly as celebrated as another bank robbery foiler, Northfield, Minnesota’s Joseph Lee Hayward, who is remembered annually at the town’s “Defeat of Jesse James Days.” Perhaps Midland could build its own tourist attraction around Hardy?

** For a detailed account of the case of Anthony Chebatoris, read Aaron Veselenak’s article in the May/June 1998 issue of Michigan History Magazine, “The Execution of Anthony Chebatoris.”

† From Burr, Dick, David Bruck and Kevin McNally (2009). “An Overview of the Federal Death Penalty Process.” Capital Defense Network.

‡ These death row inmates are: Carlos Caro (WV), Donald Fell (VT), Marvin Gabrion (MI), Dustin Honken and Angela Johnson (IA), Ronald Mikos (IL), Alfonso Rodriguez (ND), Gary Sampson (MA), and Kenneth Lighty (MD). For a description of their cases, visit the Death Penalty Information Center. All are held in the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, IN, with the exception of Gary Sampson, who is being held in New Hampshire. For more information on these cases, visit the Death Penalty Information Center.

On this day..