Old Sparky

by Anthony Galvin

  When Place arrived home at lunchtime, Martha flew out the door at him, attacking him with an axe. Before he had a chance to react, she brought the axe down on his head, shattering his skull. But she failed to knock him out with that blow and he ran. Neighbors came to his aid and someone ran for the police. When they arrived, the police found Martha unconscious in the kitchen. She had turned on the gas in an attempt to kill herself. Upon searching the house they were shocked to discover the bloodied body of Ida under the bed. Her death had been horrendous. She had been forced to drink acid, then smothered, in addition to being struck with the axe. Her mouth and face were burnt from the acid.

  Both William and Martha were brought to St. John’s Hospital in Brooklyn. William’s badly fractured skull needed surgery, with fragments of bone being removed from a hole cut in what remained of the skull. He eventually recovered. Martha was unconscious, but as the newspaper The World noted: “Doctors found that there was little the matter with her; that she had not inhaled enough gas to stir the pulse of a baby.”

  The following day she made a partial confession, admitting to throwing acid at Ida, but stopping short of admitting the murder.

  Despite this partial confession, from the start Martha pleaded not guilty. She claimed insanity, citing her earlier accident with the sledge. The horrific nature of the crime and her immediate attempt to commit suicide were considered, but she was declared sane. Once this was out of the way, the trial was uneventful. The chief witness for the prosecution was William Place, who had recovered enough to testify. The jury had no difficulty in finding Martha guilty. She was sentenced to die.

  She was sent to Sing Sing Prison, on the banks of the Hudson River, north of New York City. She was held there for the weeks preceding her date with death. She did not handle her time in Sing Sing well, and she was often subject to hysterical outbursts and fits of weeping. When she heard that her request for a retrial had been rejected, she lost all hope and sank into despair. But she had constant access to a priest, and under his guidance she regained some self-control and accepted her fate.

  There was no great public sympathy for her, given the nature of her crime. One newspaper cruelly described her as “homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her husband.” But no one was comfortable with the idea of a woman going to the electric chair—no matter how well deserving of it she was. Another journalist wrote: “It was a murder so shocking that nothing worse could be thought of—that is to say, only one thing worse could be thought of, and that was the electric killing of the old woman.”

  There was an attempt to get a reprieve, but the governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, was adamant; there would be no last second change of heart. The sentence of the law would go ahead.

  In a break from normal tradition, Martha was not given a time for her death. She was merely told that there was no hope for a reprieve and that she should ready herself for the call at any time. Whether this was done to show kindness is not known. She spent her last few days living an unusual life in the prison. She ate each day in the chief warden’s quarters, almost more like a guest than a prisoner, and she saw her priest regularly.

  On March 20, 1899, a little over a year after the murder of Ida and attempted murder of William, the call came. The electric chair in Sing Sing, one of three in New York State at the time, was ready. State Electrician Edwin Davis was in place, and the execution was to be carried out immediately. Davis had overseen the first ever electric chair electrocution and actually held patents on some parts of the chair. He was the most qualified man to do the job at the time and would eventually oversee 240 executions before his retirement fourteen years later.

  A female guard was assigned the task of leading Martha Place to the death chamber. She accompanied her to the chair, and Place sat calmly, not offering any resistance. She was dressed in a plain and drab dress and clutched a bible in her lap. As one guard stood behind her and began cutting her hair short, another slit the back of her dress so that they could attach the electrode to her leg. Once this was done, a patch on the back of her head was shorn. This was normally done several hours before the execution, not in the death chamber itself, but this was the first time any of the staff had overseen the electrocution of a woman.

  The last woman to be executed in Sing Sing had been hanged, and the execution had been botched badly, leaving her to choke to death for over fifteen minutes on the noose. Nobody wanted another mistake with this execution.

  Once both electrodes were in place, the death chamber was cleared and the generator fired up. When Davis threw the switch, 1,760 volts shot through Mrs. Place. This voltage was maintained for about four seconds, after which it was reduced for a further minute, before finally being switched to full power again for another few seconds. Then he switched the fearsome apparatus off.

  Martha Place had not struggled or cried out. After the initial contraction of the body against the restraints, there had been no movement and when the current was switched off, she slumped. Geoffrey Abbott wrote in his Amazing True Stories of Female Executions that a female doctor, elegantly “dressed in the height of fashion, immaculate in a gray dress and a huge hat with pronounced crimson trimmings” stepped forward and placed her hand under the dark hood which concealed Place’s face. She felt on the neck for a pulse and found none.

  The execution of the first woman to face the electric chair had gone flawlessly.

  THREE: GEORGE STINNEY—THE CHILD WHO FRIED

  The idea of sending a child to the electric chair is revolting. The added fact that he was probably innocent of the crime for which he was convicted makes it doubly so. Welcome to the world of Jim Crow America.

  Opponents of the death penalty say that one of its problems is that it is unevenly applied. If you are black and educationally challenged, you are far more likely to go to the chair than if you are white, middle class, and well educated. The statistical evidence reflects this to this day—though in the past it was an even greater bias and a bigger problem. Another problem is that innocent people occasionally are wrongly imprisoned and executed.

  Actually, innocent people go to the chair more often than people suspect. Independent analyses of the records bears this out. University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross and his team looked at the statistics and estimated that 4.1 percent of the people on death row were and are innocent. One in twenty-five—that is a huge number of wrongful deaths to justify or ignore.

  Abolitionists looking for ammunition need look no further than the case of George Stinney for their proof. Stinney was the youngest-ever victim of the electric chair, a child of fourteen wrongly convicted and executed in the Deep South during the old Jim Crow days.

  Looking at the case today, one cannot avoid the conclusion that Stinney was not executed; he was lynched by the state of South Carolina.

  It all began on the sunny afternoon of March 24, 1944, in Alcolu, a small town in Clarendon County, fifty miles east of Columbia. Two girls—eleven-year-old Betty June Binnicker and her friend, eight-year-old Mary Emma Thames, set out to pick flowers. They had a bicycle but walked as often as they pedaled. On their way along a forested path they saw a fourteen-year-old “colored” boy, George Stinney. They knew him well; it was a small community. They exchanged greetings and asked him for directions.

  Stinney was the last person to see them alive.

  Within a few hours, the families of both girls were becoming anxious. They were good children who did not stay out longer than they should. And they knew the local area well, so they could not have gotten lost. A search party was put together. The local lumber mill organized the search and the whole town got involved, black and white. Stinney was one of the many volunteers searching, along with members of his family. He told people that he had spotted the girls shortly before their disappearance. They searched through the night, with no success. But at seven thirty the following morning, as light slowly returned, one of the men spotted small footprints in the soft ground. They followed the trail and came
across a pair of scissors belonging to Betty June. Within minutes they reached a waterlogged ditch where the undergrowth was broken and trampled. Under the water they could make out a small bicycle. Then one of the searchers screamed; the bodies had been found.

  Men jumped into the muddy hole and both bloodied bodies were drawn forth. They had been savagely beaten with a blunt object and their skulls crushed in.

  There were no clues and no indications of what had happened. But as the investigators began to piece together the events of the previous afternoon, they remembered that one person had seen the girls after everyone else. In a community where racial prejudice lurked very close to the surface, it did not take long for the cops to decide that the young black boy was not a witness; he was a killer.

  George Stinney was arrested. The illiterate son of a local mill worker, he had just turned fourteen. There was no question of following due process. Stinney was questioned without his parents and without a legal representative. He was just a frightened black child facing a tough, white police force. They played good cop, bad cop. While some bullied the boy, others offered him ice cream if he admitted to the offense. In the end, confused and frightened, he gave the cops the confession they were looking for.

  The police alleged that Stinney led them voluntarily to the murder scene and showed them where he had concealed the iron spike he had used to beat in the girls’ heads. The fact that he wasn’t strong enough to lift the twenty-pound spike over his head effectively didn’t bother the men; they were looking for a simple solution and a scapegoat. The crime had caused outrage, and the cops needed a quick arrest.

  According to the confession they forced from him, Stinney had killed the younger girl, Mary Emma, because he wanted to have sex with Betty June. Then he killed Betty June because she struggled. When word of this version of the killing got out, a huge crowd gathered outside the county jail. There was going to be a lynching if the crowd had their way. In one of the few proper moves the authorities made, they got him out of the jail in time and into a cell in nearby Columbia.

  On April 24, just a month after his arrest, Stinney was facing judge and jury. He faced them alone, as his parents had been driven from the locality by angry neighbors. His court-appointed attorney, Charles Plowden, had political ambitions, so he did the bare minimum and made no real attempt to defend the unpopular Stinney. There were fifteen hundred spectators—each one a potential voter. A jury was selected, without a single black member. The cards were stacked against Stinney. The prosecution presented their side. Plowden shrugged and said that Stinney was too young to be held responsible for his crimes. He offered no evidence in rebuttal of the state’s case. The case opened at two thirty in the afternoon and was finished, sentence and all, by five thirty.

  “The jury [all white] retired at five minutes before five to deliberate. Ten minutes later it returned with its verdict: guilty, with no recommendation for mercy,” according to one contemporary account. Under three hours—the town was getting their lynching. Stinney would face the electric chair on June 16, 1944.

  The town of Alcolu was happy, but as word of the travesty of the investigation and trial began to spread, pressure mounted for a review. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), churches, and unions petitioned the governor, Olin Johnston, to show mercy. The governor was unmoved, despite hundreds of letters and messages. Mercy is not part of the lynching process.

  Stinney languished in prison in the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia. During the two short months he had left, he wrote to his parents, assuring them of his innocence.

  On the morning scheduled for his execution, Stinney made his last walk from his cell to the death chamber. A slight figure, at only five feet one inch and less than ninety pounds, he looked like a lost and bewildered child in the midst of the large guards. He clutched a bible to his thin chest as they shuffled him along. When they got to the chair, they realized they had a problem; he was too small for the device, which had never been designed to kill children. The guards struggled to strap him in place and were unable to tie his arms and legs as tightly as they normally would.

  They lowered the electrode onto his shaved skull and secured it as well as they could. This was the moment of his last words, and all the witnesses waited tensely, expecting a final confession. One of the guards prompted him, asking whether he had anything to say to the families. But Stinney said nothing.

  “Stinney refused to make any statement when given the opportunity by prison officials,” the Daily Item reported.

  The guards pulled the death mask down over the young boy’s face, but it was too big and didn’t fit properly. They did their best to cover his face, and then stepped back. The order was given; the switch was thrown. Immediately Stinney’s thin body convulsed and jerked. Because he was tied so loosely, his body moved more than most convicts and his head moved sharply, dislodging the mask. His face was exposed to the viewing gallery. His eyes were wide and staring, with tears coursing down his face. Spittle dribbled from his mouth. The sight of the frightened eyes of the child about to die would haunt many of the witnesses for months to come.

  Twenty-four hundred volts were applied three times in quick succession.

  It took less than four minutes before a doctor stepped forward, did a quick examination, and pronounced Stinney dead. From the time of the crime he probably did not commit to the final execution had taken just eighty-one days, unseemly haste compared with today’s more careful trial and appeal processes.

  George Stinney was the youngest person ever to sit in the electric chair and the youngest person to be executed in well over a hundred years. Unlike Britain, America had never had a culture of executing children. Since the seventeenth century, 365 juveniles have been executed—compared to thousands in the United Kingdom. The earliest was a sixteen-year-old, Thomas Graunger, hanged in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, in 1642 for the crime of bestiality, committed with a mare, a cow, two goats, two calves, several sheep, and a turkey. The youngest was a twelve year old Indian girl, Hannah Ocuish, hanged in 1786 for murdering a six year old girl.

  Stinney was the youngest executed in the twentieth century, though currently there are approximately seventy juvenile offenders on death row. Following a Supreme Court ruling in 1988, those who committed a crime before reaching the age of sixteen cannot face the chair. That ruling came decades too late for Stinney. There is some speculation that the real killer was a well-off white man, who allegedly gave a death-bed confession. At this point there is no way of proving or disproving that. We do know, however, that Stinney was innocent. That has been acknowledged at last by a retrial granted in 2014. Surviving members of Stinney’s family testified that he had been with them on the day in question and had an alibi for the time of the murders. They also testified that they could not afford to mount a proper defense for the boy and had to leave town for fear of reprisals from their white neighbors. The case was heard before Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen in December 2014 and the judge vacated the boy’s conviction, effectively clearing George Stinney’s name.

  The judge ruled that Stinney’s confession was likely to have been coerced and so was inadmissible, especially as he later denied it. She said the confession was: “due to the power differential between his position as a fourteen-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.

  “This Court finds fundamental, Constitutional violations of due process exist in the prosecution of George Stinney Junior, and hereby vacates the judgment.”

  She said that there had been a number of violations of the boy’s procedural due process rights, which tainted the prosecution. She listed these—the fact that the trial lasted just three hours and no witnesses were called on Stinney’s behalf; his court-appointed lawyer was a tax commissioner who had never worked a criminal trial before; no prosecution witness was cross-examined. On top of all that, no appeal was filed after the de
ath sentence was imposed.

  “It is never too late for justice,” said filmmaker Ray Brown, who is making a film on the Stinney case. “South Carolina got it right this time. During a period of time in our nation where we seem to have such a great racial divide, you have a southern state that has decided to admit they made a mistake and correct it.”

  It was too late for one boy lynched by a corrupt and uncaring system. Executioners, like doctors, bury their mistakes. But at least, under current legislation, no child will ever be allowed go to the chair again.

  FOUR: VIRGINIA CHRISTIAN—MAID FOR THE CHAIR

  Many states show no scruples about executing juveniles. But under current legislation someone must be sixteen or older at the time of his or her crime to be in danger of the death sentence. It was not always the case, with children as young as fourteen being sent to the chair in the past.

  As with most statistics, juvenile women are far less likely to face the chair than juvenile men. In fact, in more than a hundred years, only one girl has been given the frightful sentence. Virginia Christian made history by being the first woman to be executed by the state of Virginia in the twentieth century and the only juvenile girl to be electrocuted.

  Born in 1895, Virgina came from a poor, black family. She had some education but left school at an early age, and in her teens was working as a maid and washerwoman for a well-off white widow, Ida Virginia Belote, of Hampton. Ms. Belote was the daughter of a prominent local grocer and was well respected in the community. A small, frail woman of fifty-one, she had a violent temper and often mistreated Christian.

  On March 18, 1912, sixteen-year-old Christian was working for Ms. Belote when the widow accused her of stealing a locket and a skirt. Christian protested her innocence but Belote picked up a spittoon and struck the young girl across the face with it. As Belote continued to strike her, Christian ran into Belote’s bedroom and grabbed the first weapon to hand. Belote used two broom handles to prop her window open during the day, and the two women dived for the handles. Christian was faster and brought the broom handle down sharply on Belote’s forehead, knocking her to the ground.