Category Archives: Death Penalty

1678: Five at Tyburn

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Three men and two women hanged at Tyburn on this date in 1678.

Our text here is one of the earliest of the Ordinary’s Accounts, a far shorter and less ostentatious affair than examples of the genre even a few years later from the hand of a clergyman who has scarcely begun to grasp his true calling, moving copy.

THE CONFESSION AND EXECUTION Of the Five PRISONERS That suffered on the New Gallows at TYBURN On Friday the 6th of September 1678. At which time were Executed Daniel Massey. John Johnson. Sarah Brampfield. Hannah Smith, otherwise call'd Hebshebeth Cobb. Anne Davis, alias Smalman. With Brief Notes of Two SERMONS Preached before them after Condemnation, their Carriage in Prison, and last Speeches at the place of Execution.

The Confession & Execution of the several Prisoners that suffered on the New Gallows at Tyburn, on Friday the 6th of September 1678.

AT the last Sessions there were in all Ten persons Condemned to die; Four menf or Robberies on the Highway, and Six women for Felonies here in Town, either Lifting (as they call it) of Goods out of Shops, or else Robbing those whom they pretended to serve: both which wicked Practises are become so common, and more than once followed by these incorrigible Prisoners, that it was highly necessary to make them Exemplary. Two of the before-mentioned men, viz. those concerned in that barbarous Assault and Robbery, whereof a particular Narrative hath been made publick by the unexpected Mediation of some generous Friends; and the women whose Crimes had not been so great and obstinately continued in as the others, obtained his Majesties gracious Reprieve: and another woman, immediately after she stood attainted, was reprieved by the Court, in reguard she was found by a Female Jury to be quick with Childe.

The Rest came this day to suffer, being charitably indulged in pity to their Souls, so long time to sit and prepare themselves for their great and terrible Change. In order to which, on the Lords-day before, there were two Sermons on most suitable Texts preached before them in the Chappel of Newgate. That in the Forenoon on the fifth verse of the 38 Psalm — My wounds stink and are corrupt, because of my foolishness: Wherein the Minister very pathetically laid open the deplorable Condition such sinners are in by Nature, wallowing not onely in their original Depravity and Corruption, but in continued actual Transgressions against the holy Laws of God; whereby they become abominable, and as a loathsome stench in the Nostrils of that pure Majesty and all good men; and all this occasioned by their own foolishness, that is, their wilful rebellion and obstinacy against all the dictates of Reason, offers of Grace, and impulses of the Holy Spirit upon their Consciences. Which having, like a true Bonaerges, hereby endeavoured to awaken, and put them into a serious sense and apprehension of their lost, undone, and perishing Estate, without speedy and sincere Repentance.

In the Afternoon, as a Son of Consolation, from the 147 Psalm, vers. 3. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, he came to shew them the infinite Mercies of God, and Love of Jesus Christ, if they would come in and accept of Pardon and Salvation upon Gospel-terms. That although they had made their wounds to fester and rankle by their foolishness, and had Souls all over bespread with a filthy Leprosie, yet there was Balm in Gilead, an Almighty Physician, both able and willing to heal them, if they would submit to his Prescriptions. In order to which, he gave them divers most necessary and excellent Directions; Not to deceive themselves with a false and palliated Cure, but to close with Christ on his own Terms, and in all his Offices, as their King to Rule them, and their Prophet to Guide them, as well as their Priest to Intercede and make Atonement for them. To hate Sin more, because it was displeasing to God, than because it brought upon them temporal or eternal Punishments. To be as desirous to be Holy as to be Happy; because none can be justified until they are sanctified, Etc.

During the whole time of Religious Worship, and the Sermons, they behaved themselves very Reverently and Attentively; nor was the Minister wanting afterwards, daily to visit them, with pressing Exhortations, and necessary directions to sit them for their last end; especially charging them to disburthen their Consciences, and give glory to God by a free and hearty Confession of their Sins; which had so good an effect, as to bring them to an Acknowledgment; not only in general term, but particularly bewailing the Ill Courses of their past Lives; in neglect of the publick Divine Worship, Violation of the Lords day, Drunkenness, Swearing, and continual practises of Lascivious Debauchery; Two of them above the rest abounding in expressions of Penitence, and endeavouring to improve those few moments of their Lives, to work out their Salvation, and make their peace with God; begging heartily forgiveness from his most holy Majesty, for their Rebellion against his Precepts, and of all those whom they had wronged, by violent taking away their Temporal Goods.

Some of the Women had been Condemned before, and would often bewail the wickedness of their Hearts, that would take no warning thereby: the Men alleadged, they were ignorantly drawn in to that ill Fact, for which they suffer’d, being their first of that kind, and rather by the unhappy operation of too much Drink, than any premeditated design; yet confessed, they had more than once deserved to Dye, and freely acknowledged the justice of the punishment they were to suffer.

At the place of Execution they said little, besides those common, but too much neglected Exhortations, desiring all present to take Warning by them, and remember their Creator in the days of their youth; Not to suffer themselves to be seduced by Ill Company, or sensual pleasures, which had been the means of their destruction, and would be so of all, that did not continually keep a reverent fear of God, and his Worship and Laws in their Hearts.

Thus heartily praying to God for Forgiveness, and to receive their Souls for the alone Merits of his blessed Son; and desiring all good people to joyn with them and for them in those Supplications, they submitted to the Sentence, and taking their leave of all things in this world, were wasted into the unfathomable Regions of Eternity.

FINIS.

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1878: George Howell, family arbiter

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From the Morristown (Tenn.) Gazette, September 11, 1878:

EXECUTION OF HOWELL

THE CONFESSION OF THE GUILTY WRETCH

From the Knoxville Chronicle

Yesterday Greeneville was astir with the bustle of unusual excitement consequent upon preparations for the execution of the negro George Howell for the murder of Joseph Martin, near Fullen’s station, December 28th, 1877.

A strong police force was sworn in by the town authorities, and Sheriff A.J. Frazier had summoned a large guard to preserve on the occasion. There were no anticipations of attempted rescue of the prisoner, though frequent rumors to that effect had reached the officials, but it was deemed best to be prepared for any emergency, and though the crowd was large, yet no serious disturbance arose.

HOWELL’S CONFESSION.

Some time after sentence of death was passed on him, the prisoner, Howell, made a full confession of the crime and its antecedents to Mr. J.R. Self, proprietor of the Journal, which, if true, put the family of the deceased in the worst possible light, he having declared in the plainest language that the widow and children of the murdered man, by bribes and threats, instigated him to do the deed.

Your reporter, accompanied by several others, visited the prisoner the day before his expected execution, Aug. 9th, expecting to see a burly black ruffian, but entering the cell, beheld confined in the cage, a negro lad, with a remarkably good countenance, holding a book in his hand. In one corner was a small pallet on which he slept, which was the only furniture it contained.

The prisoner seemed gratified at the entrance of visitors and answered all questions freely, even the frivolous one of whether Martin’s ghost ever appeared to him in the still hours of the night, to which he replied in the negative.

HIS ANTECEDENTS.

The unfortunate boy, George Howell, was born in La Grange, Ga., in October, 1861, his owner being Mr. Arch. Howell, who subsequently operated a steam furniture manufactory. His father’s name was Ephraim and his mother’s Mary, the former of whom is living, but the latter died when the prisoner was five years old. His father was a painter, and after his mother’s death both made their home in Atlanta, Ga., for six or seven years, the former pursuing his avocation of painting, while the boy waited on stores, confectioneries, etc. From thence they afterwards removed to Smyrna, Ga., where the prisoner remained a year in the employ of a Dr. Bell. He went from there to Cartersville, Ga., and by that time having become imbued with the spirit of unrest, visited Dalton and proceeded thence to Cleveland and Knoxville, and drifting as far east as Christiansburg, Va. But not liking the Old Dominion he returned to Bristol the day before the Presidential election in November, 1876. A few days after he entered the employ of J.B. Fitzgerald, near Fullen’s Depot, and remained there about seven months. He then worked a short time for Wm. Durman, perhaps two weeks, when he received a better offer and began working for Joseph Martin on the 19th of June, 1877.

The prisoner, in his interview, reiterated the confession previously made to Mr. Self and others regarding the complicity of Martin’s family with the murder, and avowed his intention, he said:

I had been at Martin’s for some time, perhaps a month, before I discovered any misunderstanding between Martin and his family and this occurred between him and his daughter Tennie. She upbraided him for his staying away from home so late; he kicked her over and struck her with a chair.

The next difficulty occurred between Martin and his wife, she accused him of visiting a house of ill fame near by, he went to his trunk, took out a pistol, and swore he would shoot her.

These wranglings and domestic quarrels continued all along through the summer, I remember of one, which at the time I thought would result seriously; it occurred some time in the fall, and late at night, I was asleep in the barn, little Bob woke me up, I went to the house and found Martin in a terrible rage, he said to me that his wife had refused to occupy his bed, that she had taken a separate room and that he would kill her, or any woman, bearing the name of wife, that would treat him in this manner. Bob and I set up the entire night.

THE BLOODY BARGAIN.

The following narrative of events immediately preceding the tragedy seems almost too horrible for relief, because if not the phatasmagoria [sic] of a disordered brain, the prisoner was but the hired tool of an unnatural wife and children. In this connection it should be stated that an attempt was made two days before the executions, by a member of Martin’s family, to induce Mr. Self, the publisher of the “confession,” to suppress the same, which, however, he declined doing. Continuing, the prisoner said:

Some two months before Christmas the family were all in the sitting room — perhaps some of the smaller children were in bed — when Mrs. Martin commenced abusing her husband (Mr. Martin was away from that night, I think he was at his mother’s or brother’s.) The girls, Margaret and Tennie and their brother Bob, all joined with their mother in denouncing the deceased. Mrs. Martin said that ‘Joe had threatened to kill you, (me) twice, and if I was you (me) I would kill him,’ she said that ‘Joe had followed you (me) one day in the railroad cut with the intention of killing you (me) and that if I did not kill him he would certainly murder me, and, if I would kill him she would bake me some cakes for Christmas.’ Bob spoke up and said that he ‘would give me two calves and a pig if I would kill his father.’ I do not remember my reply, but from that time on it was well-understood in the family that Mr. Martin was to be killed, and that I was to do it, and the family were to swear me out of it.

Mrs. Martin baked the cakes for the prisoner on Christmas, he said, reproaching him at the same time for his failure to perform his promise. Three days later, however, he endeavored to do so, and a runaway team, which diverted his attention, was the means of prolonging Martin’s life a few hours. The same evening after being informed that the gun, with which the fatal deed was committed (an Enfield rifle) was loaded, the prisoner made a new ramrod for it the iron rod being too short, and while cutting it the right length at the wood pile, according to his statement, Bob, a son of Martin’s about thirteen years old, brought him the gun, and told him to go around the house and shoot his father. Bob then went into the house, and the prisoner thus describes the

MURDEROUS DEED.

I went round in front and looked through the window, and saw Mag sitting on one side of the fire-place, Tennie on the opposite, Mr. Martin out in front and Bob sitting away back next the back door. They were all out of range. I stepped up to a plank at the edge of the portico took aim at Martin’s ear and fired. I then ran out at the front gate, next the railroad, poured some powder in the gun, put on a cap as I run, went into the barnyard. At this time I saw Martin and his son in the meadow. I fired my gun into the air, shouting to them that there were some robbers going through the field. I did this for the purpose o making Martin think he had been attacked by ‘tramps.’

I then went to Martin and kept with him until he reached the ‘Ridge’ road, some four hundred yards from his house, and at this point, Mr. Thomas stokes, having heard the firing and Martin’s cries for help, come to us. Mr. Stokes took Martin home with him, and deceased, not having at this time, the slightest suspicion that I was the one who shot him, requested me to go back to his house and see what had become of his children. I did so, little Bobby accompanying me. We returned to the house. I went in the large front room, and from there into a small bed-room and set my gun down and came back in the large room, when Miss Mag. gave me a clean shirt and told me I had better leave the country; that it would be all over the country by next morning, that her father was killed, and I would be in danger.

Howell told how he combatted Miss Maggie’s advice, saying “if they stuck to him he would be in no danger,” and acting on that idea the results was disastrous, for the next morning, he was arrested near Fullen’s depot by James F. Dobson and taken before the jury of inquest, where he denied all knowledge of the deed, but under cross-examination his answers were contradictory and he was arrested and taken to Rheatown, where he was examined before Justice G.A. Shoun. On the way the prisoner made a full confession to D.C. Dukes and Wm. T. Mitchell.

He was lodged in jail at Greeneville, Dec. 29th ult., and the case came up before the February term, 1878, of the Circuit Court, but the trial was postponed till the June following, when a verdict of guilty was rendered.

In his “appendix,” the publisher says:

The ‘confession,’ proper, was written at the suggestion of the prisoner, Howell, and after some hesitation we undertook the task: … The language is our own, but we have adhered strictly to the substance of the matter as detailed by him.

IN PRISON.

During his imprisonment, Howell has been visited frequently by clergyman [sic] and others who have conversed and prayed with him, but apparently with out producing any impression to the last. Many think him obdurate, though others more leniently think he could not comprehend the gravity of his situation. He appeared resigned to his fater and expressed deep regret for the crime.

Our reporter visited Howell in his cell yesterday morning, accompanied by Messrs. Dukes and Self. He was reading the 4th chapter of John, and in response to the question, said that he hoped he was prepared to die. He also said that he derived great pleasure from reading the Scriptures, especially a chapter in Revelations regarding the Great Wonder in Heaven.

The statement having been made by Messrs. Frank and Sevier Martin, brothers of the murdered man, that Howell had been prevente4d by Messrs. Dukes and Self from recanting his charges against the Martin family for complicity in the crime, Mr. D. asked the prisoner to state if such was the fact, who replied that it was not, and so far from it that both these gentlemen had repeatedly urged him to make a clean breast of it, and tell the truth.

Howell’s health has been very bad for some time, and last week his life was considered in danger. He stated that he wished to see the Martin family at the scaffold, where, if they came, he would charge them with having brought him. Howell requested that his body should be given to Dr. J.R. Boyd, who wished to make some slight surgical examination, though he objected to out-and-out dissection.

The crowd in attendance was small as compared with that which assembled on the 9th of August. There is, too, considerable change of public sentiment in regard to the complicity of Martin’s family in his murder.

As is generally known, Howell was respited on the 9th of August last, the day first designated for his execution, by Gov. Porter, through the exertions of W.F. Yardley, Esq., who afterwards unavailingly attempted to procure a commutation of the death penalty to imprisonment for life.

THE GALLOWS

Was erected one mile west of Greeneville, on the Knoxville road, and is the first one on which a “drop” has been used in East Tennessee for many years, and was constructed at Howell’s own request, he not wishing to die by strangulation.

A little after 12 o’clock the black cap and shroud were placed on the prisoner in his cell, and the procession left the jail at 12:40, p.m., reaching the gallows, near the fair ground, at 1:10, p.m. Silence was requested when Howell made a rambling, incoherent talk of thirteen minutes, exhorting the young people against bad advisers. He charged the Martin family with being the cause of his death to the last. He acknowledged his guilt, and the justice of his sentence, and forgave the court, jury and officers.

The devotional exercises were conducted by Judge A.W. Woward.

At 1:49 p.m. the black cap was drawn and the prisoner stepped on the trap. One minute after the cord was cut, and he

FELL FOUR FEET.

In forty-seven minutes he was dead, and, the body being cut down, was given over to Dr. Boyd to partially dissect. The crowd was very orderly during the execution.

Sheriff A.J. Frazier was assisted in the performance of his unpleasant duties by ex-Sheriff W.S. White. Having been in office only four days, this was of course, his first execution, but he evinced a coolness throughout.

PREVIOUS EXECUTIONS.

The last man hung by civil process in Greeneville was Archibald Brown, for the murder of Malinda Hinkle, about twenty-six years ago. But the beginning of the war, there were two victims of drum-head court martial executions, Hinchey and Fry, well known Union men, for the alleged crime of bridge burning.

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1799: Ettore Carafa

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On this date in 1799, a nobleman turned republican was turned into a martyr.

Fruit of the distinguished Carafa family, Ettore Carafa (English Wikipedia entry | Italian) was the Count of Ruvo but preferred the ennoblement of all mankind.

After a youthful trip to Paris on the verge of the French Revolution, Carafa returned to make himself the scandal of the Neapolitan aristocracy by such behaviors as translating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and wearing the republican tricolor to the opera. Carafa was eventually obliged to break out of prison and take sanctuary in the Cisalpine Republic but he returned in glory (and no little satisfaction) with the 1799 Parthenopean Republic, when Naples briefly went republican, too. Commissioned an officer in revolutionary Naples’s army, he besieged his hometown of Andria.

Alas, this democratic interlude did not even live out the year, and many of its leading lights paid the forfeit to a violent reaction. Naples’s briefly-exiled queen was Marie Antoinette‘s sister and nowise forgiving when it came to Jacobin types and certainly not “such a man as Carafa, fit match as he was to Caracciolo, and held in almost equal terror by the Court.”

Carafa was one of its last holdouts, defending Pescara from siege well after Naples itself had fallen.

On September 4, 1799, Carafa mounted the guillotine with aplomb, his last words a command to the executioner Tommaso Paradiso, “You will tell your queen how a Carafa can die!” Then he slid himself under the knife on his back, boldly looking up at the instrument of death as it crashed through him.

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2016: Mir Quasem Ali

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On this date in 2016, Bangladesh hanged tycoon Mir Quasem Ali for crimes against humanity committed during that country’s 1971 War of Independence from Pakistan.

Known at the time of his death as the wealthiest patron of the party Jamaat-e-Islami, Mir Quasem Ali was in 1971 a first-year physics student at Chittagong College.

This cataclysmic year saw “East Pakistan” — as it was then known — separated from Pakistan amid an infamous bloodbath, and it was for this bloodbath that Ali hanged 45 years later. At the time, he was a member of the Islamist student organization Islami Chattra Shangha;* in the autumn of 1971, that organ was tapped for recruits to the pro-Pakistan paramilitary Al-Badr which helped carry out wholesale massacres. Some three million people are thought to have died during this war.

The court that noosed him found that Ali helped to orchestrate the abductions of pro-independence activists to a three-story hotel in Chittagong commandeered from a Hindu family. Victims there were tortured and some murdered, although others survived to tell of Al-Badr guards announcing the defendant’s arrival with the words “Mr Quasem is here. Mr Commander is here,” seemingly establishing quite a high degree of responsibility for events under that roof.

After a bad result in the war, he fled to Saudi Arabia and embarked on the business career that would see him into the global oligarchy as a billionaire media mogul and (once back in Bangladesh) the chief financier of the chief Islamist party. When a score-settling Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed initiated a tribunal to try human rights crimes from the 1971 war, Mir Quasem Ali immediately started spreading millions around Washington D.C. lobby shops in an unsuccessful bid to use international pressure to shut down the proceedings.

He maintained his innocence to the last, even refusing to seek a presidential clemency since that would have entailed an admission of guilt. These trials, several of which have ended at the gallows, have been intensely controversial within Bangladesh, and without.

* Its present-day successor organization is Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir … which was founded in 1977, by Mir Quasem Ali.

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1937: Alexander Shlyapnikov, Workers’ Opposition leader

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September 2 was the execution date during the purge year of 1937 for Old Bolshevik trade unionist Alexander Shlyapnikov.

The metalworker Shlyapnikov was a man who came by his revolutionary politics right from the shop floor. At the age of 10 he left school to work in a foundry, “having learnt to read and write. School was no mother to me, and it was not the teachers who educated me … the teachers were young and very rude, and they often meted out justice to their young charges with their fists. Even during these years, life taught me that there is no justice in this world.” (Source) Born to an Old Believer family, his fervor for justice had an initial religious bent, but after moving from provincial Murom to St. Petersburg/Petrograd* he discarded godliness and became a labor militant of sufficient stature to start turning up on blacklists before he was out of his teens.

During the political chill following Russia’s failed 1905 revolution, the oft-arrested Shliapikov worked abroad in western Europe — by now both a master of his difficult craft, and a Bolshevik who had led an armed rising in his hometown of Murom. Here he became socially and politically close with Lenin and all the brand-name Communist exiles, as well as with European labor unions and left parties.

He also shuttled to and from Russia coordinating the movement’s internal and external actors; he’s left us a memoir of the political maneuvers and adventurous border-crossings of these years. Thanks to this role, Shliapnikov was the most senior Bolshevik on the scene in Petrograd when the February Revolution broke out; he was immediately a key figure in the Petrograd Soviet, and was the Bolshevik state’s first Commissar for Labor.

As the newborn USSR solidified in form and function, Shlyapnikov nursed growing concerns about its distance from — and tendency to run roughshod over — actual workers. He soon became a leading voice for the Workers’ Opposition** around 1919 to 1921. Where the Bolsheviks held that theirs was an ascendant workers’ polity that had subsumed mere guilds, Shlyapnikov insisted on the trade unions as distinct from the Soviet state and the Communist party — “a syndicalist deviation” in Lenin’s charge. The Workers’ Opposition was prescient in its critique of the once-utopian project’s creeping bureaucratizm, with real workers’ material interests, dissenting perspectives, and local idiosyncracies giving way everywhere to the center’s policy orthodoxy dictated through “apparatuses of power … located practically in hands alien to the interests of the working class.” (Source)

Although prominent in its day, the Workers’ Opposition viewpoint was not destined to carry forward into Soviet theory or practice. After bread shortages drove workers and sailors at Kronstadt into a rebellion that the Bolsheviks crushed in 1921, the Workers’ Opposition tendency was quashed within the party. Shlyapnikov thereafter held second-rate posts, and was several times investigated by the Communist Party for “factionalism,” finally being expelled under Stalin in 1933.†

He was favored with a 2016 biography by Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (review). Allen discussed Shlyapnikov in an interview with the indispensable Sean’s Russia Blog podcast, here. We yield to Allen’s description of Shlyapnikov’s demise among the purging of Old Bolsheviks following the Kirov affair — tragic, banal, and heroic in his plain refusal to gratify his persecutors with any manner of confession or groveling.

In April 1937 he was accused according to article 58-8 and 58-11 of the RSFSR law code of having led a counterrevolutionary group called the Workers’ Opposition, of having linked up with the ‘counterrevolutionary Trotskyist-Zinovievist terrorist bloc’ and of having ‘tried to conclude a bloc with Ruth Fischer for joint struggle against the policy and measures of the Comintern.’ It alleged that he advocated ‘individual terror’ and that groups he directed in Omsk, Rostov-on-Don, Kiev, Odessa, Baku, Kharkov and Moscow had ‘prepared and tried to realise the murder of comrade Stalin.’ Acknowledging that Shlyapnikov did not confess his guilt, the accusation established it through the testimony of Zinoviev, Safarov, Vardin and others. It recommended that the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court should try him and apply the 1 December 1934 law. Applying to cases of terrorist acts, this law ordered the immediate execution of capital-punishment sentences, with no appeals.

The USSR Supreme Court Military Collegium met on 2 September 1937 in closed session to sentence Shlyapnikov, who appeared before the court in a two-hour long session. Refusing to admit his guilt, he also detailed his objections to others’ testimony against him. Given the last word, Shlyapnikov declared that he was ‘not hostile towards soviet power.’ Perhaps as a last ironic remark, he confessed guilt only to ‘a liberal attitude towards those around him.’ Nevertheless, the court on the same day found him guilty under article 58, paragraphs 8 and 11, of having led ‘an anti-Soviet terrorist organisation, the so-called “Workers’ Opposition,”‘ which carried out ‘counterrevolutionary activity directed towards the topping of soviet power.’ He was convicted of having been in contact with ‘leaders of Trotskyist-Zinovievist and Right-Bukharinist terrorist organisations’ and of having ordered members of his ‘anti-Soviet organisation’ to carry out ‘terrorist acts’ against party and government leaders. Then the Military Collegium sentenced him to ‘the highest measure of punishment — execution by shooting with confiscation of all personal property.’ Below this was pencilled: ‘the sentence was carried out on that day in Moscow.’ Despite ‘eyewitness’ tales that he survived for years longer, either abroad or under a false name in the Gulag, documents attest to the fact that shortly after his 1937 execution, Alexander Shlyapnikov’s body was cremated and buried in Donskoy cemetery in a common grave.

* Peter the Great‘s jewel was still St. Petersburg when Shlyapnikov arrived there in the last years of the 19th century; it was renamed Petrograd in 1914 and carried that name during the events of the 1917 revolutions and thereafter. It became Leningrad in 1926, a name that stuck for the remainder of the Soviet era.

** Alexandra Kollontai was also a noteworthy Workers’ Opposition exponent; her apologia makes for sad reading considering the Soviet state’s coming vector towards sclerotic authoritarianism.

† Stalin’s ideological mediocrity is commonplace observation but perhaps its signal instance occurred upon his arrival to revolutionary Petrograd before Lenin: where Shlyapnikov was refusing to entangle the Bolsheviks with the Provisional Government (post-February revolution, pre-October revolution), Stalin insisted on a more moderate and cooperative attitude. When Lenin arrived shortly thereafter, his April Theses famously re-set Bolshevik policy in Shlyapnikov’s more intransigent direction — a defeat to which Stalin owed the Bolshevik conquest of power and his own eventual opportunity to execute men like Shlyapnikov.

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1999: David Leisure, mob war veteran

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Gangster David Leisure — not to be confused with the “Joe Isuzu” actor of the same name — was executed by lethal injection in Missouri on this date in 1999.

A rare real-life mafioso — perhaps the first executed in the United States since Murder, Inc. boss Louis “Lepke” Buchalter in 1944 — Leisure shattered the tense 19-day calm after St. Louis mob boss Anthony Giordano died in 1980.

What would the post-Giordano underworld look like? The Leisure family sized up 75-year-old James “Horseshoe Jimmy” Michaels Sr. as a rival to eliminate for reasons both personal and professional. Paulie Leisure, his brother Anthony, and their cousin, our man David Leisure, already held Michaels responsible for permitting the murder of another family member in 1964. But as a more direct inducement, Michaels purposed to wrest control of a mobbed-up union from the Leisures.

On September 17, under Paulie’s orders, David Leisure and Anthony Leisure tailed Michaels onto Interstate 55, where by remote control they detonated a bomb they’d attached to the undercarriage of their enemy’s Chrysler Cordoba.

A nationally known gangland war ensued, nicknamed the “Syrian-Lebanese War” — not in tribute to world news but because mobsters of Levantine descent were a principal St. Louis crime faction, and it was for primacy among them that the Michaels and Leisure circles murdered one another. The next year, Paulie Leisure lost his legs to a retaliatory bomb, which in turn led the Leisures to kill Michaels’s grandson, and on and on.

By 1983, FBI informants had brought all our Leisure characters under indictment. David Leisure already had lengthy prison sentences for racketeering and for a different car bomb murder by the time the Show Me State was ready to prosecute the Michaels murder. Paul Leisure never got the death penalty but he died in federal prison a few months after his cousin’s execution. The St. Louis mafia has been said to be reduced by the present day to little more than a social club for aging wiseguys from a bygone world.

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1816: Joaquim Camacho

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On the last of August in 1816, the Colombian statesman Joaquin Camacho was executed as a traitor to Spain.

Blind and paralyzed — he had to be carried to his firing squad in his chair — this lawyer-turned-journalist decorated the 1810-1816 “Foolish Fatherland” era of present-day Colombia, when New Granada declared independence from a Spain bogged down by the Napoleonic Wars.

In fact, multiple regions and municipalities within New Grenada each began declaring their own sovereignty in 1810. The July 20, 1810, declaration by Bogota — then and now the capital city — is still commemorated as Colombia’s Independence Day.

And Camacho (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) was right in the middle of it.

On the morning of July 20, in a maneuver intentionally staged to coax the Spanish authorities into showing their backsides to New Granada’s patriots, Camacho presented himself to the viceroy to request the calling of a council in Bogota — a request he would (and did) certainly refuse. Elsewhere in the iconic “Flower Vase Incident,” Camacho’s comrades solicited of a wealthy royalist merchant the use of his ornamental flower vase to welcome the arrival of a noted fellow-traveler. They too were predictably refused, and escalated the expected affront into a fistfight and thence to a riot in the market. The backlash against these indignities gave cover to proclaim the independence of Bogota — with Camacho among the signatories of the declaration at a public meeting that evening.

During the exciting years that followed, Camacho served in the Congress of the United Provinces of New Granada and for a few months in 1814-1815 as one of a triumvirate collectively exercising the office of president.

All such offices were swept away by the Spanish reconquest of New Granada under Pablo Morillo, who lived up to his chilling nickname “El Pacificador”. Camacho was among numerous separatist and revolutionary leaders put to death to control New Granada, several of whom we have already encountered in these annals. It worked … for all of three years, until Simon Bolivar accomplished permanently what Camacho et al and died in seeking.

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1894: Abbe Albert Bruneau

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French priest Albert Bruneau was guillotined on this date in 1894 for murder. (Most of the available information about this case is in French, as are most of the links in this post.)

The Abbe‘s protests of innocence fell on deaf ears considering his history of degeneracy — thefts, seductions, even firing his own parsonage for the insurance money — stretching back to his seminarian days.

He’d been condemned for killing that January at Entrammes another priest, Abbe Fricot — whose body had wound up plundered of valuables and dropped down a well. This epidemic of priest-on-priest violence made for a tremendous public sensation that certainly was not conducive to Bruneau’s efforts to defend himself. Once he became suspected of Fricot’s murder, he was also baselessly implicated in (though never charged with) the unsolved killing of a Laval florist from the previous year.

A thread on guillotine.cultureforum.net draws our attention not only to some wonderful original reportage but to the riveting first-person account of Henri Massonneau in his Devant l’Echafaud (In Front of the Scaffold, available free online from Google Books or Gallica). Massonneau recounts the fury in Laval, where crowds expecting the execution a couple of days previously pelted the prison with taunts for the condemned man.

Bruneau’s cell, very tall in the tower of the Vieux Château, was illuminated. The mobs were screaming:

“Bruneau! It’s for this night! You will dance!”

In the night spots around the city, Massonneau even heard patrons grumbling for the head of Bruneau’s barrister, for having dared to defend the monster.

The magistrate and energetic proto-true crime scribbler Pierre Bouchardon* took up l’Affaire de l’Abbe Bruneau in 1942 and thought the legal proceedings inexcusably slipshod owing to the prejudicial atmosphere. (Unfortunately his Le Puits du Presbytere d’Entrammes (The Well of the Presbytery of Entrammes) falls under the pall of copyright and must be hunted among sellers of antique francophone titles.) Many other retrospectives have reached a similar conclusion.

We return to Massonneau, who has caught wind on the evening of August 29 that the beheading will take place early the next day, and even secured for himself entry into the prison to observe Bruneau’s last hours:

At half-past two in the morning, the van carrying the guillotine arrives, escorted by six gendarmes, at the Place de la Justice. This square is planted with tall trees and surrounded by stone terminals connected by chains. To allow the van to enter the square, the chains at the extreme angles had to be sawed. The square has been evacuated, but the windows of the neighboring houses are full of curiosity, and the square of the Cathedral which opens directly on the place du Palais de Justice, following it, is black with people.

We will attend the spectacle. But there will not be gladiators fighting wild beasts, nor bullfights, nor athletes measuring themselves: it will be the law that will kill an unarmed man. There are men, women, children, bourgeois, farmers, workers, many priests. Kids have climbed into the trees. We can not dislodge them. There are six thousand people around the guillotine. It’s a grand success. The weather is superb, the night is even hot.

From a distance, the crowd follows the assembly of the guillotine. When the sinister machine stands up, erect in the night, joy breaks out. We are finally quiet: Bruneau will be executed. The hour passes. My colleagues and I are entering the prison, but we are numerous and the Prosecutor of the Republic informs us that we will not be able to enter the cell of the convict. We will have to wait for him in the chapel where he will come to hear his last mass. From that moment, we will not leave him.

The magistrates entered his cell at 4 o’clock. Bruneau did not sleep. The Public Prosecutor said to him:

“Bruneau, courage. The time has arrived.”

Bruneau looked around, haggard. Then he said:

“Can I get up?”

“Yes, dress up.”

He put on his pants. The prosecutor asked him if he had a confession to make.

“No,” he replied, “I am innocent, not only of the crimes for which I was acquitted, but also of the one for which I was condemned. I only committed indecent assaults. I am innocent.” He delivered a letter to the Prosecutor.

“You will read it,” he said, “at the same time as my advocate, and you will deliver it to the public.”

In this letter, Bruneau again protests his innocence and says he forgives those who have hurt him. The letter was not published. Despite claiming to forgive them, Bruneau leveled slanderous accusations against some witnesses of the trial.

I go down to the chapel. It is located in a basement. From the chandeliers, a dozen candles flicker a dim light. Soon the chapel is full of people … I have never seen a scene more moving than the appearance of Bruneau in the chapel. He has come down at a brisk pace the twenty steps that lead to it. He wears his beard, very black, which gives him a remarkably energetic appearance. His foot scarcely leaving the last step, the condemned stiffens, and with a sudden movement turns towards the holy water font. His arms are shackled and he must make an incredible effort to take holy water. He looks like an automaton. He crosses himself, not without difficulty, then with a sure step approaches the high altar. There, he drops to his knees. A thump sounds. Bruneau seems lost in a chasm of prayer.

The chaplain approaches him and speaks to him in a low voice; Bruneau resumes his prayer; the chaplain comes to ask the prosecutor for permission to isolate himself with the condemned man to hear his confession. The prosecutor hesitates, but consents in the end. The chaplain returns near Bruneau, helps him get up, and they both head for a corner of the chapel hidden by a curtain. They disappear behind it. Two guards come to stand near the curtain.

The confession lasts ten endless minutes. Finally, Bruneau comes to take his place, on his knees, in front of the maître-hôtel. And the mass begins. Another twenty minutes pass. The assistants suffer visibly for the convict throughout; Bruneau communes. Finally the ceremony is over. Bruneau, before going out, again takes holy water, and he has the same difficulties as before. He is very calm. He climbs the stairs without weakness. It feels like a man walking in a dream. From the chapel, one goes into the courtyard to go to the registry where the last toilette is to be made. It is a small room on the ground floor. Through the door, left open, I attend these funereal preparations. Quietly, without affectation, he says he is hungry. It’s a new delay. Priests usually eat immediately after communion. It is habit that he is hungry.

He leaves the registry. I run forward and I come near the scaffold. The police commissioner who is there says to me: “It’s not him already?”

“Yes, yes, here he is.”

“But it’s impossible! It is not legal time. I cannot yet permit the execution.”

Then all that I thought during the Mass about the mental state of the condemned returns to me, and I say to the commissioner:

“Well! Have a chair brought there, near the guillotine, and sit down until it is legal time. I’m sure he will not protest … ”

“No, no, it’s not possible,” he said. “We have to wait for the hour.”

And he makes as if to go to the prison, just as the procession emerges. I stop him:

“Do not worry for so little. In Paris, we always guillotine before the hour.”

“You think?”

“I’m sure.”

“Ah! so …”

Bruneau is near the scaffold. It is exactly 4:47. Legally, indeed, it is at 5:15 that the execution should have taken place. We are half an hour ahead. Bruneau has crossed without faltering the two hundred meters that separate the prison from the scaffold. Contrary to all the condemned, he does not want to see the guillotine. Two meters from the bascule he turns his head with affectation so as not to behold it. The chaplain presents him a crucifix. Bruneau kisses it twice, then he drops into the arms of the chaplain and kisses it for a long time.

The executioner’s assistants seize him but he tears free with a sudden movement and turns to the chaplain begging again to kiss the cross. He can not take his lips off the crucifix. The chaplain speaks to him, exhorts him to courage, and with a movement of exquisite gentleness pushes him towards the assistants who seize him and precipitate him onto the bascule.

When Bruneau entered the Palace Square, a huge “Ah!” came out of the crowd. But once he is here, we hear no sound; no word is uttered; nobody budges. Bruneau’s struggle against death at the foot of the scaffold lasted two minutes, two centuries.

The knife falls. Society is avenged. Its representatives on the Cathedral Square record this victory by frantic applause. It is interminable, already, the head is thrown in the basket with the body, the basket in the van, and the van rolls towards the cemetery. The crowd is still clapping. By the Place du Pilier-Vert, the Place des Arts, the Rue Neuve, the Pont-Neuf, the Rue de la Paix, in ten minutes the convoy arrives at the cemetery, between two curious hedges. Since three before days the pit was dug and the coffin was waiting.

Bruneau is buried at the end of an alley on the right, in the section of mass graves. The following year, passing Laval, I went to the cemetery. I found in front of the tomb two kneeling nuns who were praying. Many people, indeed, in the religious world, did not believe the culpability of Bruneau. But it is incorrect, as has been said, as I myself reported then, that the bishop of Laval made every effort to obtain pardon for the condemned. The bishop of Laval was stricken with immense sadness when Bruneau’s crimes were discovered. He cried, remained silent, and died of sorrow.

Wikipedia claims that the scandal of the murderer-priest inspired the French journalist Paul Bourde‘s 1902 play Nos deux consciences (Our Two Consciences), a piece adapted to cinema by Alfred Hitchcock in 1953 as I Confess. (review)

* Most famously, Bouchardon prosecuted Mata Hari.

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1941: Henri Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, the first martyr of Free France

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Henri Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, the “first martyr of Free France”, fell to German guns at the Fort du Mont Valerien on this date in 1941, along with two companions.

A Catholic nationalist naval officer, d’Estienne d’Orves found himself in Egypt in June 1940, when his government capitulated to the devastating German blitz.

Eschewing the accommodationist crowd, d’Estienne d’Orves made his way first to a fleet in Somaliland, and then around the Cape of Good Hope and up to London, to link arms with de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile. By December of 1940, he’d infiltrated himself into German-occupied France to set up a spy network. By January of 1941, most of the network had been arrested by the Gestapo.

He and eight others were death-sentenced on May 13 and although the German brass entertained the possibility of clemency as their tribute to an honorable fellow-troop, the growth of partisan attacks against the Reich throughout that summer* eventually dictated a more punitive course. D’Estienne d’Orves, Maurice Barlier, and Jan Doornik were fusilladed together, disdaining blindfolds.


Proclamation in German and French announcing the August 29, 1941 executions of Henri Louis Honore d’Estiennes d’Orves, Maurice Charles Emile Barlier, and Jan Louis-Guilleaume Doornik.

* Germany’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 forced European Communist parties — and very notably the formerly reticent French Communists — into violent anti-Nazi resistance.

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1858: Peter Williams and Abraham Cox, to the air of Old Ironsides

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Peter Williams and Abraham (or Abram) Cox were hanged on this date in 1858* in Auburn, Maine, for the maritime murder of the crew of the Albion Cooper.

They’ll tell you all about it in a lyrical “last words” that would have you believe they did a musical number on the scaffold, to the air of the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem “Old Ironsides”. A couple of fine gentlemen have done us the favor of making a shanty of the poem on YouTube, if this helps put you in the mood, although, since “Williams and Cox” imitate Holmes’s meter and nautical theme but not his brevity, you’ll need to run it back a few times if you mean to make it to the end.

And a one and a two …

* The Espy file of U.S. executions erroneously attributes the double hanging to August 27, 1860.

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