Women were spared this—instead they were tied to a pole and a fire built around them. They were then burned to death. This was a common punishment for those accused of witchcraft. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries up to three hundred thousand women across Europe were subjected to this savage execution.
Times were harsher and most people accepted the rightness of capital punishment. But even then there were voices crying out against the practice. In the twelfth century, a Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, wrote: “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death.”
It was a minority view.
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CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE USA
At present, capital punishment—the death penalty—is a legal sentence in thirty-two of the fifty states. It is also legal in the Federal justice system and in the military. While it was once a widely used sentence for rape, murder, kidnapping, burglary, and other crimes, now it is limited by the Eighth Amendment to aggravated murders committed by mentally competent adults.
The history of the death penalty in the United States is long. During the years before independence, all parts of the country, which then operated under English common law, used it. Hanging was the most popular method, but firing squads and other methods were also tried.
Capital punishment came to America with the early British colonists. The first legal executions in the colonies occurred in Virginia. In 1608 George Kendall was put to death for spying. Kendall, born in England in 1570, had settled in Jamestown, Virginia. In 1607 he was appointed a member of the first council of the colony, but a few months later was removed from the council and imprisoned, for sowing discord between the council members and plotting mutiny. Shortly after, a row broke out between the president of the council, John Ratcliffe, and a local blacksmith, James Reed. Reed was sentenced to hang, but as he stood on the gallows he confided to Ratcliffe that Kendall had been involved in a conspiracy against the council.
For divulging this information Reed was pardoned but Kendall was sentenced to death. He was held for nearly a year and in the fall of 1608 he was executed by firing squad, becoming the first victim of capital punishment in modern America.
Kendall had been convicted of spying but the first proper criminal to be executed was Daniel Frank, which again occurred in Virginia. Together with George Clark, Frank stole a calf belonging to George Yeardley, a rich landowner and future governor of Virginia. Pushed by starvation, they butchered the animal but were caught and tried. The trial took place on August 5, 1662.
The evidence showed that Frank had led the way and Clarke was just an accomplice—but that he helped bring the carcass to Frank’s house and shared in the subsequent meal. Both men were sentenced to hang. Frank was an indentured laborer—common as muck—but Clarke was a skilled gunsmith. He was valuable to the colony, so he was pardoned. But Frank was led from the courthouse and hanged from a nearby tree within minutes after the trial ended. He holds the distinction of being the first criminal to be executed in what was to become the United States.
Ten years later, Jane Champion became the first woman to be hanged in North America. Her offense is unknown. A year later, Margaret Hatch was hanged for murder. Both executions took place in Virginia.
Almost from the start, America had adopted hanging as the favored method of execution.
Worldwide, hanging is one of the most popular methods of execution. It has a number of advantages. One of these is that it involves little equipment—a high tree and a rope are often enough, though in traditional places of execution, such as Tyburn in London, a gallows was built. This was a wooden platform from which the rope could be suspended. With a big gallows, several people could be hanged at once. Hanging a convict involved far less work than drawing and quartering, burning, or even mustering a firing squad.
Another advantage is that the body could be left on display as a deterrent to others.
In extrajudicial executions such as lynchings, hanging was almost invariably used as it was so easy to arrange. The victim was placed on a horse or a cart, or even stood on a stool, and the rope placed around an overhanging branch. The stool was kicked away and the person slowly choked.
There are four common ways of hanging someone: suspension, short drop, standard drop, and long drop. Prior to the nineteenth century, only the first two methods were used. Suspension is when someone is just jerked off the ground by the noose around their neck and their own body weight strangles them against the noose. The short drop is similar in effect; the person is on a ladder or stool or similar platform, and when it is removed they drop a short distance and the noose tightens around them. Typically the noose cuts off the carotid artery, the main blood supply to the brain, and unconsciousness results within the first minute—though this is not always the case. The condemned does not struggle because of the soporific effect of the blood supply being cut off, and goes limp. It takes about ten to twenty minutes for death to occur.
This was the method of execution used in Virginia in the early days of the colony, before the United States became independent.
In modern times the standard drop and the long drop, both British innovations, have become popular. The standard drop involves a trapdoor on the gallows through which the condemned prisoner falls. The distance of the fall is normally between four and six feet and often results in the neck breaking, which speeds up death considerably as well as resulting in almost immediate unconsciousness. The long drop is a more scientific advance on the standard drop. The distance of the drop is calculated based on the height and weight of the prisoner, and the noose is placed around the neck with the knot to the front, which forces the head back as the convict drops, guaranteeing that the neck will snap.
But the drop has to be calculated precisely because too big a drop can result in decapitation, which is considered a “cruel and unusual punishment” and thus illegal under US legislation.
During colonial times, the death penalty was widely used. Britain influenced America’s use of the death penalty more than any other country. Hangings were done in public so that they would not just serve as a punishment—they were also a good moral lesson for the community. Hundreds would show up to see the victim swing. Normally a condemned person would be displayed on the gallows while a minister delivered a sermon. Then a mask was pulled over the face, a noose placed around the neck, and the platform the prisoner was standing on would drop away, plunging the condemned to his or her death.
Over the years the crimes for which hanging was considered an appropriate punishment changed. At one time, adultery was punishable by death, but this was later changed to public humiliation whereby the condemned were forced to stand on the gallows with a noose around their necks for an hour while everyone jeered at them. Then, for the rest of their lives, they would have to wear a red “A” on their clothing to alert people to their past sins. This was the Scarlet Letter made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his book of the same name.
The more cruel European methods of execution rarely made their way to America. Burning at the stake was the European punishment for witchcraft. But when there was an outbreak of supposed “sorcery” in Salem, Massachusetts, those convicted were hanged rather than burned. In fact, burning was only ever used against black defendants and then only following slave revolts.
The deterrent effect of the death penalty was important. When pirates were executed, their bodies were often hung in gibbets, or body-shaped cages, by the shore or along a waterway. The flesh would rot away until all that was left was the skull and bones. In 1723 the Admiralty Court in Newport, Rhode Island, sentenced twenty-six pirates to death. When they were hanged, it was the largest nonmilitary mass execution in American history.
Death penalty laws varied from colony to colony. Some were more draconian than others. In 1612 in Virginia, Governor Sir Thomas Dale introduced the Divine, Moral and Martial Laws. This statute allowed for the execution of those convicted of stealing
fruit, killing chickens, or trading with the natives. Other colonies were more lenient, but from the start executions were a feature of life on the frontier. For instance, Massachusetts Bay Colony executed a man in 1630 even though the capital laws of New England were not drawn up for years to come. The New York Colony operated under a penal code that allowed execution for striking one’s mother or father or denying the “one true God.” The Salem Witch Trials saw twenty people hanged for purely imaginary crimes.
Some of the executions from this period were horrific. During the Slave Revolts in New York in 1712, twenty-one black slaves were executed in the most brutal fashion. Twenty of them were roasted alive over a fire, dying in agony. One was broken on the wheel, a medieval torture. The slave was tied to a cart wheel and his limbs were shattered by repeated blows of a heavy hammer until he died of blood loss, trauma, and shock. The executioner was careful not to hit his head or torso, which would have sped up the death.
With the exception of the treatment of slaves, the colonies continued to be influenced by events occurring in Britain and Europe. By the middle of the eighteenth century an abolitionist movement had sprung up in Europe, backed by the writings of philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jeremy Bentham; and British Quakers like John Bellers and John Howard. Austria and Tuscany, states in what is now northern Italy, were the first to remove death penalty from their statute books. All this happened around the time the United States gained their independence from Britain.
Taking this lead, Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill to amend Virginia’s death penalty laws. He proposed that execution should be reserved for the serious crimes of murder and treason, rather than being used for minor matters like theft. He came close to succeeding, losing by just one vote.
In 1792 Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a founder of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, began to push an abolitionist agenda. He felt strongly that public punishments were not a deterrent. At that time, it was common for those convicted of minor crimes to be locked in stocks for the day while the whole community jeered at them—and for those convicted of serious crimes to be executed in a very public manner. Rush felt this “brutalizing effect” dehumanized society, making crime more likely rather than less.
Instead he proposed imprisonment, which would allow convicts to reflect on what they had done and to allow God back into their lives. He wrote a treatise in 1792 in which he said: “The punishment of murder by death is contrary to reason, and to the order and happiness of society.”
He gained the support of Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia Attorney General William Bradford and pushed the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish the death penalty for all but first-degree murder.
But executions were still a regular occurrence. Up to the gaining of independence, nearly 1,500 convicts had been executed. Between 1800 and 1900 the number rose sharply, to 5,381. Ten percent were in Virginia, while Texas accounted for only a tiny fraction—a trend that would dramatically turn towards the end of the twentieth century.
In 1790, the Bill of Rights was written. One of its provisions was that punishments could not be “cruel or unusual,” which made roasting slaves illegal.
The period between 1800 and 1900 accounted for some of the most savage executions that the United States has seen. One day in 1862, thirty-eight people were hanged simultaneously, the largest single execution in US history. The public executions came at the end of the Dakota Wars of that year. Following the suppression of the Indian tribe, 303 Sioux prisoners were convicted of murder and rape by a military tribunal. They were all sentenced to death.
Some of the trials lasted less than five minutes—hardly due process for a capital case. None of the Sioux were represented by counsel and the proceedings were not explained to them. Aware of the deficiencies of the legal process, President Abraham Lincoln personally reviewed the trial records to try and distinguish who were guilty of murdering civilians and who deserved clemency on the grounds that they were fighting a war. General John Pope and Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey cautioned against leniency, with Ramsey saying: “Unless all 303 Sioux are executed, private revenge would on all this border take the place of official judgment on those Indians.”
Lincoln eventually decided to commute the death sentences of 265 of the tribe, but 38 of the executions would go ahead.
The day chosen for the mass hanging was December 26, 1862, the day after Christmas. The location was Mankato, Minnesota. A single scaffold was built with a square gallows, allowing men to be hanged on all four sides. There was a large platform to hold all thirty-eight men while the nooses were secured. The Indians sang a war song as they stood and one exposed himself to the crowd, much to their horror. Then there were three beats of the regimental drum, and the executioner stepped forward with an axe and swung it, cutting a rope which held the platform in place. As the platform fell away, all thirty-eight Indians fell. Thirty-seven nooses tightened and jerked, and thirty-seven men began to twitch in the air as they slowly died.
The thirty-eighth man, Rattling Runner, fell to the ground as his rope snapped. He did not move and appeared to be dead from a broken neck. But, to be sure, a new noose was tied around his neck and thrown over the scaffold. He was hoisted aloft. After hanging for about fifteen minutes, the thirty-eight bodies were cut down and then buried in a mass grave in a trench by the river bank.
One landmark during the nineteenth century was in 1834 when New York and Pennsylvania decided that executions should be conducted within the prison rather than in public. This marked a change in thinking on capital punishment. A division was beginning to appear between the northern states and the southern states. In the North, states were bringing in legislation to limit capital punishment, while the southern states still used it as a punishment for a wide range of crimes. One reason for the division was that the north was industrialized, whereas the south was agricultural, relying on an underclass of slaves and poor whites who needed to be “kept in check.”
In 1838 Tennessee ended mandatory death sentences, allowing juries to decide if life imprisonment would be a more appropriate sentence. In 1846 Michigan abolished the death penalty for all crimes except treason. It was the first state in the union to abolish the death penalty. In 1853 Wisconsin followed suit, ending the death penalty for all crimes. Rhode Island did the same.
Most states did not follow that lead and retained the death penalty. But one by one they changed their legislation so that a judge or jury had discretion on when to impose the death penalty and when to commute it to life imprisonment. The old days when certain classes of crime carried a mandatory execution were passing. It took until 1963, but the mandatory death penalty was now no more.
While each state moved at its own speed, trends were emerging. One trend was that imprisonment was becoming more common, providing an alternative to the gallows. A second trend was that the death penalty began to be seen as a brutalizing spectacle for a society. By the end of the nineteenth century, prisoners were always executed behind prison walls. Public executions—aside from lynchings in southern states—were seen as a legacy of the bad old days.
A third trend was that reformers began to think of new ways of conducting executions. Certain methods were left firmly in the past. Breaking on the wheel—used only on one occasion in the United States—would have been unthinkable by the mid-nineteenth century, even against slaves or Native Americans. In Europe the guillotine and the garrote had been perfected to make executions swift and painless. England still retained hanging but had worked out ways of making it more humane. The changing world attitudes towards the death penalty—attitudes that were reflected in the United States—is best illustrated by looking at accounts of two executions carried out in Cork, Ireland, around the time reformers were looking at the ultimate sanction of the law.
The first execution took place on April 26, 1828. Owen Ryan had been convicted of rape and was hanged in front of the city prison in a big public
spectacle. There was great excitement in the town because the hanging was a free show. And a new type of gallows was to be tested, which should have made death instant. Here is how the local paper, The Cork Examiner, described the entertainment:
There was an immense concourse of spectators attracted, we presume, to witness the first operation of the dread apparatus at the prison. About an hour before the execution we went into the gate where we observed becomingly solemn arrangements. A black flag waved on high and minute bells tolled.
At half past twelve, the convict moved from his cell through the passages and yards leading to the house of death, accompanied by the Sheriff, Governor, and High Constables. Uncovered, he walked with firm step, his countenance fixed and solemn.
A door in the gate of the prison opened and the executioner could be seen working out figures as Ryan stood behind him, his face masked.
After a few minutes he was moved forward on the board that was to throw him into eternity and the work of horror commenced. Upon this fatal spot he was delayed several minutes, the board the while now and again rising under him, and the rope pulling him up on tip-toe; and, at length, only a gentle throw off and scarcely two inches of a drop. He torturingly and tediously died.
Instead of being flung into eternity, the drop snapping his neck, Ryan had been gently pushed off the board and dropped two inches, slowly strangling in front of hundreds of cheering spectators. Afterward, the officials explained that they were worried that if they used a big drop, the prisoner would swing over and back and could be dashed against the prison wall. Better they let him die slowly than be hurt during the process!
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