The justices also examined the horrific phenomenon that occurred on December 9, 1938, and many other times before and after: inmates surviving the first shock in the electric chair. The Georgia justices cited a witness who said the skull shields the brain from electricity at first and that the electricity could even effectively shock a dead man’s brain back to life during the execution, “causing the perception of excruciating pain and a sense of extreme horror.” In conclusion, the court held, “death by electrocution, with its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies, violates the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.”11
Georgia and other states switched to death by lethal injection, but the controversy and the debate continue. In 2012, there were forty-three executions in the United States. Thirty of them—about 70 percent—were in the southern states of Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Florida. Eleven of the executed men were black, six were Latino, and twenty-six were white. Thirty-one of the forty-three crimes involved white victims. Race remains an issue, particularly in North Carolina, where judges have reversed death sentences of black defendants on the grounds that race was a key factor in the outcomes of the cases.
In 2011, Georgia executed Troy Davis, a black man, for the 1989 shooting death of a white Savannah police officer, Mark Allen MacPhail, even though police never found the murder weapon.12
The case against Davis consisted mostly of eyewitness testimony and an alleged confession Davis gave to a jailhouse snitch. Many of the witnesses would later recant all or portions of their testimony, although the prosecutor, Spencer Lawton, publicly questioned the validity of the recantations. “Each of the ‘recanting’ witnesses was closely questioned at trial by lawyers representing Davis, specifically on the question of whether they were in any way pressured or coerced by police in giving their statements or testimony,” Lawton wrote. “All denied it.”13
Shell casings found at the scene of the MacPhail shooting were the same type as those found at another shooting linked to Davis, Lawton wrote. But the ballistics tests were inconclusive as to whether the bullet that killed MacPhail and the bullet that injured a man in the second shooting linked to Davis were fired by the same gun. A federal judge, William P. Moore ruled in 2010 that only one of the seven recantations was “credible.” The testimony of the “jailhouse snitch” who said Davis confessed to the killing was “clearly fabricated” the judge said, adding that he was puzzled why the state of Georgia would even try to defend the testimony. However, in the end, neither Moore nor any other judge would spare Davis. “The vast majority of the evidence at trial remains intact,” Moore wrote. “Mr. Davis is not innocent.”14
The case put Georgia’s criminal justice system back in the international spotlight, just as it had been after the publication of Robert Burns’s book so many years before.
Pope Benedict and Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and former Georgia governor and U.S. president Jimmy Carter questioned whether Davis had received a fair trial.
A few days before Davis died by lethal injection, more than two thousand people marched down Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta to oppose the execution. The rally ended at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. had preached. His son, Martin Luther King III, joined the Troy Davis march. “Too much doubt to execute,” read banners held by the demonstrators.15
Unlike the six men executed on December 9, 1938, Troy Davis had more than twenty years of appeals in both state and federal courts. Still, critics of Davis’s execution say his case was one with wavering witnesses and no conclusive physical evidence. It was shrouded by doubt.
In another high-profile multiple-murder case in Georgia, there was no doubt. In 2005, Brian Nichols, a black man, was on trial for the alleged rape of his girlfriend. Nichols overpowered a sheriff’s deputy in the Fulton County Courthouse, took her gun, and then killed a judge and a court reporter in the courtroom in front of many witnesses. Escaping the courthouse, Nichols killed another deputy and a federal law enforcement officer.
A jury convicted Nichols of the crimes but could not reach a unanimous verdict on a death sentence, so he was allowed to live.
The contrast between the fates of Troy Davis and Brian Nichols is cited, even by some supporters of capital punishment, as an example of the death penalty’s continued inequality, its continued randomness, despite the legal safeguards that followed the Furman decision.
Although the electric chair is now a museum piece in Georgia, the deaths continue via lethal injection, as does the debate about the legality and morality of the death penalty. It has been more than seventy years since the mass executions of December 9, 1938, at Tattnall Prison, but these questions and many others still linger. The death penalty remains unsettled, particularly in the South. It is still with us.
A promising New Dealer. Georgia governor-elect E. D. Rivers in Washington, D.C., December 22, 1936, to discuss the state’s problems with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. [Courtesy Library of Congress]
George Harsh and Richard Gallogly, dressed in suits and ties, posed for photos following their arrest in the fall of 1928 for murder. [Courtesy Associated Press]
A New Deal prison. A frieze entitled “Rehabilitation” by sculptor Julian Harris adorns the entrance to Tattnall Prison. The construction of the prison was met with optimism in Georgia that the archaic, brutal chain-gang system would soon be replaced. [Courtesy Susan Beasley]
The electric chair at Tattnall Prison used in the mass execution on December 9, 1938. The chair is still at the prison, a museum piece sometimes viewed by school groups and others. [Courtesy Susan Beasley]
Three switches controlled the electric chair’s current. [Courtesy Susan Beasley]
The smiling, affable Hiram Wesley Evans (above), Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, leading a parade in Washington, D.C., September 13, 1926. [Courtesy Library of Congress]
Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the NAACP and later the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court justice, fought to save two Georgia death row inmates, Arthur Perry and Arthur Mack, from the electric chair. [Courtesy Library of Congress]
A plea for help: Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for the NAACP, sends a telegram to Gov. E. D. Rivers asking him to spare the lives of Arthur Perry and Arthur Mack, two young men tried for murder and sentenced to death while still suffering from gunshot wounds. [Courtesy Georgia Archives]
Eugene Talmadge, governor before and after E. D. Rivers, was an open racist and strong opponent of FDR’s New Deal. Rivers appeared in public to be a racial moderate and New Deal backer, but was a long-time leader of the Ku Klux Klan who named the Klan’s national leader to his staff. In this photograph, taken in 1946, a gaunt Talmadge is running for his fourth term as governor, wearing his signature red suspenders. He won the race, but died before taking office. [Courtesy Georgia State University]
Governor E. D. Rivers greets actor Clark Gable at the airport for the premiere of the blockbuster movie, Gone With the Wind. Gable’s wife, the actress Carol Lombard, is holding flowers. [Courtesy Georgia State University]
The writer Erskine Caldwell ridiculed Georgia’s poverty in his fiction, but at the same time prompted calls for change and may have influenced the state’s decision to launch a forced-sterilization program. [Courtesy Library of Congress]
Reformist governor: Ellis Arnall, who served as Georgia attorney general under Gov. E. D. Rivers, was elected governor in 1942. Citing the pardon scandal during the Rivers administration, Arnall successfully pushed a constitutional amendment barring Georgia governors from issuing pardons. [Courtesy Georgia State University]
Christ the King Catholic Church, constructed on the site of the Ku Klux Klan’s former Imperial Palace, an irony since much of the Klan’s wrath was aimed at the Catholic Church. [Courtesy Georgia State University]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the summer of 2008, the U.S. economy in general, and the newspaper industry in particular, were struggling. At the same
time, perhaps not coincidentally, the idea for this book emerged while I was fact-checking an opinion piece on the death penalty. As a newspaper reporter, I witnessed an execution in Georgia’s electric chair in the 1980s. In the 1930s, my great-grandfather, B. H. Beasley, was warden of Tattnall Prison, a centerpiece of this book.
Without hesitation, my wife, Susan, and children, Laura, Emily, and Zachary, urged me to take the leap, not knowing how we would pay the mortgage and tuition payments, how we would keep the lights on, how we would eat, after that year’s severance pay was spent. In addition to risking everything, as if that were not enough, Susan also spent countless hours with me in dark archives, sorting through file after file, and was a great editor and sounding board for the book. When other families were vacationing at the beach, the Beasleys were traveling to Reidsville, Georgia, to view the state’s old electric chair and death chamber.
No writer could ask for more.
I would also like to thank Matt Martz, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, who was presented with a confusing collection of crime stories and was able—we hope—to turn them into a cohesive story that you, the reader, will easily understand.
A mass execution, by its very nature, is complex, particularly if you attempt, as we did in this book, to write about not only those who died, but those who lived. Matt’s skillful editing made the narrative possible.
Thanks also to all the researchers of the past who left behind invaluable information, including Jane Herndon, who wrote her dissertation on Governor E. D. Rivers in the early 1970s, taped the interviews, and donated the tapes to Georgia State University for all of us to use. Thanks also to all the writers of Klan history, including Nancy Maclean, David Chalmers, and Kenneth Jackson. The work on eugenics by Edward Larson, Paul Lombardo, and Edwin Black was invaluable. Amy D’Unger at Georgia Tech found funding to pay for redaction records on sterilization at the Georgia Archives that will benefit researchers for generations to come. Richard Moran took time to school me on the history of the electric chair and was encouraging from the start about this project
And thanks to everyone at the Georgia Archives, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Auburn Avenue Research Library, the University of Georgia, and Georgia State University who helped with this research. Thanks to Jane Hansen at the Georgia Supreme Court, for cheerfully and promptly fielding many requests for documents and to Che Alexander at Fulton Superior Court for unearthing documents that no one else could find. The Georgia Department of Corrections was also very prompt and cooperative.
As managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hank Klibanoff instilled in his staff a love of history and was also helpful to me on this book after my career at the newspaper was over. Another journalist, Sherri Butler of Fitzgerald, Georgia, took time out of her demanding job as a weekly newspaper reporter to help track down information on a key character in the book, Tom Dickerson. Steve Oney, also formerly of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, read, corrected, and commented on the manuscript, an invaluable contribution from a writer deeply steeped in the history of the Deep South.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Arnall, Ellis. The Shore Dimly Seen. J. B. Lippincott, 1946.
Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.
Burns, Robert. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! University of Georgia Press, 1997.
Caldwell, Erkine. Some American People. Robert McBride, 1935.
_____. Tobacco Road.
Cebula, James E. James M. Cox, Journalist and Politicians. Garland Publishing, 1985.
Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism. Doubleday, 1965.
Cox, James M. Journey Through My Years. Simon and Schuster, 1946.
Evans, Hiram Wesley. The Rising Storm. Reprint edition. Arno Press, 1977.
Galloway, Tammy Harden. The Inman Family. Mercer University Press, 2002.
Glover, Charles E. Journey Through Our Years. Longstreet, 1998.
Harsh, George. Lonesome Road. Curtis Books, 1971.
Haywood, Harry. A Black Communist in the Freedom Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Henderson, Harold Paul. The Politics of Change in Georgia. University of Georgia Press, 1991.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. Grand Central Publishing, 1998.
Larson, Edward J. Sex, Race, and Science. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Maclean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mellicamp, Josephine. Senators from Georgia. Strode Publishers, 1976.
Moran, Richard. Executioner’s Current. Random House, 2002.
Pomerantz, Gary. When Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn. Scribner’s, 1996.
Roquemore, Nell Patten. Lanier County, the Land and Its People. Self-Published, 2012.
_____. Roots, Rocks, and Recollections. Self-Published, 1989.
Trent, James W. Inventing the Feeble Mind. University of California Press, 1994.
Woodward, Emily. Empire. Ruralist Press, 1936.
NEWSPAPERS (1928–1946)
Atlanta Constitution
Atlanta Daily World
Atlanta Georgian
Atlanta Journal
Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle
Columbus (Ga.) Ledger
Jackson (Ga.) Argus
Kourier
Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal
New York Times
San Antonio Light
MAGAZINES
Time
DISSERTATIONS
Akin, Edward Proxamus, IV. “The Ku Klux Klan in Georgia: Social Change and Conflict, 1915–1930.” University of California Los Angeles, 1994.
Herndon, Jane Walker. “Eurith Dickinson Rivers: A Political Biography.” University of Georgia, 1974.
Miller, Zell Bryan. “The Administration of E. D. Rivers.” University of Georgia, 1958.
TAPED INTERVIEWS
Conducted by Jane Walker Herndon for dissertation on E. D. Rivers, available at Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives, Series M., E. D. Rivers (P1992-18).
Ellis Arnall, 1971.
Roy Harris, 1972.
Braswell Dean, 1971.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: Waiting to Die
1. “Six Die in Chair Today,” Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 9, 1938.
2. Ibid.
3. Letter from Tom Dickerson to Fitzgerald Herald, Dec. 8, 1938, Georgia Archives, RCB 9002: 1937–1941—Gov. E. D. Rivers—Clemency, 1939.
4. “Tattnall Prison Bought by State,” Atlanta Constitution, June 22, 1937.
5. U.S. Census, 1940, Georgia summary.
6. “Tattnall Prison Bought by State.”
7. “Rivers Reiterates Schoolbook Plea,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 12, 1936.
8. Erskine Caldwell, Some American People (Robert McBride, 1935), 207.
9. Georgia Department of Public Health, Monthly Mortality Report, Jan. 1, 1939–Aug. 31, 1939, Georgia Archives, Vital Statistics, 1939.
10. Robert Burns, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! (University of Georgia Press, 1997).
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. “Tattnall Prison Bought by State.”
15. Ibid.
16. Registry of Inmate Deaths, Tattnall Prison, viewed by author at the prison, May 23, 2012.
17: The description “power cords dangling from the ceiling” is from photographs of Georgia’s electric chair in the late 1930s.
18. Nell Patten Roquemore, Lanier County, the Land and Its People (Self-Published, 2012).
19. Former Speaker of the Georgia House Roy Harris, 1972, in taped interview conducted by Jane Walker Herndon for dissertation on E. D. Rivers, available at Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives, Series M, E. D. Rivers (P1992-18).
20. Mary Alice Lee of Lakeland, G
eorgia, interview by the author December 2012. The description of E. D. Rivers as flirtatious is common among those who knew him, men and women, and is mentioned most frequently when describing the former governor, second only to the black bow ties he always wore in public.
21. “New Deal in Georgia Is Pledged by Rivers,” Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 26, 1936.
22. “Calls President a Radical,” New York Times, April 19, 1935.
23. “Talmadge Flays Old Age Pensions,” Atlanta Constitution, July 30, 1936. Although Social Security payments did not formally begin until January 1, 1940, the Social Security Act of 1935 included emergency grants to states for old-age pensions and other programs. States were required to administer the emergency grants.
24. “Rivers Asks Voters for Amendments,” Atlanta Constitution, May 9, 1937.
25. “Rivers Pledges ‘New Deal’ for Georgia” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 13, 1937.
26. Ibid.
27. Mitchel Westberry, to E. D. Rivers, Feb. 19, 1938, Georgia Archives, RCB 7655: 1937–1941—Gov. E. D. Rivers—Correspondence, 1938.
28. “Rivers Calls for Completion of New Deal Program,” Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 19, 1939.
29. Proposal by E. D. Rivers to Works Progress Administration for establishment of a national free textbook program, Nov. 1938, Georgia Archives, RCB 7655: 1937–1941—Gov. E. D. Rivers—Correspondence, 1938.
30: “Schoolbook Bid Revisions Sought,” Atlanta Constitution, July 21, 1937.
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 20