Tag Archives: thomas dewey

1948: Arthur Eggers, by Earl Warren

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Arthur Eggers was gassed in California on this date in 1948.

He had murdered his wife in December 1945, using his carpenter’s tools to saw off her head and hands to complicate identification. Although this gambit didn’t work, there was no clear motive or physical evidence to tie Eggers to the crime and he might have skated had he not put his used car up for sale a week later. It was bought by a sheriff’s deputy, who promptly found Dorothy Eggers’s blood in the boot. As it emerged, it seems to have been a crime borne from sexual rage, as the vivacious Dorothy apparently slept around and/or ridiculed Arthur’s impotence.

Eggers’s death warrant carried the signature of California Gov. Earl Warren, who at this moment was just a couple of weeks out from coasting to the White House as the Vice Presidential nominee on the Republican ticket. The ticket-topper Thomas Dewey was comfortably outpolling unpopular incumbent Harry S Truman, and merely running out the clock to a comfortable win universally anticipated by pundits.


lol.

Well actually, it turned out that Earl Warren would be cooling his heels in Sacramento for five more years.

Warren is an intriguing figure for our site‘s interests, for a couple of reasons.

Most obvious to U.S. readers is his 16-year stint as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Chief Justice. He was a liberal Republican, a once-numerous species subsequently hunted to extinction, and his tenure atop the “Warren Court” is synonymous with postwar liberal jurisprudence that has been anathema to his former party ever since. Warren retired in 1969 prior to the decision, but the landmark 1972 Furman v. Georgia rulng invalidating then-existing death penalty statutes is a legacy of that same epoch; even before Warren’s own departure from the court a nationwide death penalty moratorium had settled in, in anticipation of the federal bench sorting out whether the death penalty could continue to exist at all. (Warren died in 1974, so he never saw the triumphant return of capital punishment.) Beyond the specific issue of the death penalty, Warren’s court greatly strengthened the due process rights of accused criminals with consequences for every criminal prosecution down to the preseent day: it is this period that gives us the Miranda warning (“you have the right to remain silent …”), the right to an attorney for indigent defendants, and prohibitions on using evidence obtained by dodgy searches.

But we can also view Warren the Vice Presidential candidate as an oddity.

While we’ve dwelt here upon the rich death penalty history of U.S. Presidents, our future liberal legal lion appears to be the most recent Vice-Presidential nominee for either of the two major parties to have sent men to an executioner, at least a judicial one. For whatever reason, the VP bids subsequently have tended towards products of Congress rather than the governors’ mansions where the life-and-death calls get made; there’s an exception in 1968, when both Spiro Agnew (Republican) and Edmund Muskie (Democrat) had been governors … but Agnew was the brand-new governor of Maryland during the Warren Court’s aforementioned death penalty moratorium, and Muskie the previous governor of Maine, which abolished capital punishment in the 19th century. The sitting Vice President as of this writing, Mike Pence, would kill a human as easily as a fly, but no death cases reached his desk during his 2013-2017 spin as Governor of Indiana: ongoing wrangling over the availability and constitutionality of various lethal injection drugs has sidelined the Hoosier headsman for the best part of a decade.

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Which U.S. Governors have overseen the most executions?

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This past week, Texas Governor Rick Perry notched his 250th execution. Writers, movie stars, guys who didn’t do it … Perry has executed them all.

That’s far and away the most for governors under the modern US death penalty regime. But is it an all-time record?

Rick Perry is number one.

The answer appears to be “yes”: a review of state execution data reveals no other governor throughout the U.S. constitutional era who even approaches Perry’s body count, at least not when it comes to peacetime civilian cases. Only two other men — Perry’s predecessor George W. Bush, and Depression-era New York chief executive Herbert Lehman* — appear to have signed off on as many as one hundred executions.

In attempting to explore this question, I compiled this rough list of the U.S. governors who have overseen a large number (35+) of executions. Emphasis on rough. The method I’ve used here is just a quick manual comparison of the historical U.S. executions recorded in the Espy file to U.S. governor terms as reported on Wikipedia. Then, I backed out known federal executions, which for most of U.S. history took place in various state prisons. (For instance, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were electrocuted at Sing Sing in New York … but not by authorities of the Empire State.)

I would not suggest sourcing anything one depends on to the figures in this chart without further investigation and qualification; the list is certain to contain errors, including:

  • Omissions or mistakes by the Espy file itself.
  • Miscalculations or misdating on my part.
  • Governors who served non-consecutive terms who I’ve failed to identify.
  • Any consideration of governors who might have been temporarily incapacitated or absent during their term with another party exercising the relevant powers in their stead
  • Civil War executions, which I simply steered around

Beyond attributing numerical counts to date ranges, this list reflects essentially no state- or period-specific research: it’s worth bearing in mind that the legal context and gubernatorial authority relative to the death penalty vary over time and between states. A name and a number on this list is not the same as judging a governor personally “responsible” for all or any of those executions, not even necessarily to the extent of having signed off on a death warrant. It’s only in the late 19th century and into the early 20th century that states centralized all executions away from localities and into state penitentiaries, with the familiar appeal-for-clemency ritual. A given governor’s personal involvement in a given local execution prior to that (and particularly in antebellum America) is not to be assumed. Even now, some states (present-day Texas included) limit the ability of the governor to extend clemency, or vest that power in an agency.

Caveats aside, here’s that rough (rough!) list:

The large numbers here predictably map to large states (with lots of people to commit lots of crime and generate lots of death cases) and/or long-serving governors. Rick Perry is about to start his 13th year as Texas governor, and this is actually a remarkably long tenure. Most governors in U.S. history have held the office for surprisingly brief periods, just 2-4 years.

For example, post-Reconstruction Jim Crow Georgia executed at a terrific pace (routinely ten or more executions per year, for decades on end) and several of its governors therefore appear on this list … but those governors had what you might call limited upside, as they were term-limited to two consecutive two-year terms. Had Georgia ever put an executive kingpin in the governor’s mansion for a decade or more, that person would easily rank up there with Bush and Lehman. (Not with Perry, though.)

Typical office tenures have somewhat lengthened into the 20th and 21st centuries, but this is just when the execution rate itself has fallen off. Many of the larger (50+) execution totals come from the period when those two trends crossed in the first half of the 20th century, with men (Ann Richards, George W. Bush’s predecessor, is the only woman to show) running large states for five-plus years.

This confluence also leads to the interesting appearance of liberal lions among the 20th century’s most prolific American executioners:

  • Liberal “Rockefeller Republican” Thomas Dewey, with 95 executions as New York’s governor.
  • Dewey’s running mate in the “Dewey Defeats Truman” presidential election, Earl Warren: he sent 82 to the gas chamber in a decade as California governor before he was appointed to leave his lasting legacy heading a left-leaning Supreme Court
  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who okayed 51 executions as governor of New York (and then 16 more federal executions as president)
  • Gifford Pinchot, who’s best known as the progressive-era father of the Forest Service, but also spent eight years as Pennsylvania’s governor and oversaw 81 executions.

Feel free to chime in with corrections, data points, musings, and bootless speculations in the comments.

* Herbert Lehman was the son of one of the founders of Lehman Bothers investment bank. Bush was the son of the founder of the inexplicable Bush political dynasty. We’re guessing nobody thought of their prolific-executioner connection when the Bush administration let Lehman Brothers go bankrupt in 2008.

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