“I was here at the last execution, as free as any one of you, and little thought of this my unhappy fate. God grant you all more grace than I have had.”

-Last words of burglar John Ives, hanged with six other felons at Tyburn on June 6, 1764.

On this day..

• 1895: John Eisenminger, forgiven
• 1900: Guzeppi Micallef, Maltese felon
• 1730: Sally Bassett, Bermuda slave
• 1971: Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, Vietnam War photojournalists
• 1940: 32 innocent Poles
• 1962: Henry Adolph Busch, Psycho
• 1884: Charles Henry, iced in the Arctic
• 1662: Potter, bugger
• 1879: John Blan, panicked
• 1671: Stenka Razin, Cossack rebel
• 1832: Not Javert, spared by Jean Valjean
• 1997: Henry Francis Hays, whose crime cost the Klan