Executions in the United States

The United States has used various methods for inflicting the death penalty, and within living memory these have been used not only on murderers, but also burglars and armed robbers.

Anybody undertaking even the most cursory examination of the death penalty as it has operated in the United States cannot fail to notice one glaringly obvious fact, namely that black people and members of other ethnic minorities are far more likely to be hanged, gassed, electrocuted, shot or given lethal injections than white people. A few examples will make this a little clearer.

The largest mass execution in American history, and incidentally the greatest number of people ever to be hanged simultaneously anywhere in the world, took place in the Minnesota city of Mankato in 1862. On that occasion, no fewer than 38 members of the Dakota tribe were hanged from a single, enormous scaffold. They had been found guilty of waging war against settlers and the United States army. In the twentieth century it was predominantly black people who appeared to be over-represented in the statistics for capital punishment in America. The last person to be publicly executed, in Kentucky in 1936, was a young black man called Rainey Bethea. He had been sentenced to death for rape. In the United Kingdom there were no executions for any offence other than murder or treason from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. The case was very different in America. Just five years after Rainey Bethea was publicly hanged, a 22 year-old man died in Alabama’s electric chair for burglary. Like Bethea, Frank Bass was an African-American and on 8 August 1941, he became the last person to be executed for this offence in the United States. In the decade before Bass’ execution, 10 other men had been executed for burglary. Every one of them was black. It was a similar story with other types of capital crime, with black men being grossly over-represented in all groups.

Between 1930 and 1964, a total of 25 men were executed in the United States for armed robbery. Of these, 19 were black and just six white. The statistics for rape are even starker. Between 1930 and 1964, there were 455 executions for rape; 405 of these men were black. Notable individual executions are also alarmingly likely to feature African Americans. In 1944, the youngest person executed in twentieth century America died in South Carolina’s electric chair. It is almost beyond belief, but George Junius Stinney was just 14 years of age when he died. He was so small that a thick book had to be used as a booster seat so that the straps of the electric chair could be fastened around him. The black teenager had been convicted of murder; a verdict which has since been quashed. George Stinney was not the only teenager to face the electric chair in the 1940s. Another African American youth was sentenced to death at the age of 16 for a crime committed when he was just 15 years of age. He achieved fame as the only person in history to survive electrocution in the electric chair.

In late 1944 a pharmacist in Louisiana was shot and killed in what was assumed to be a robbery. Nine months later, a 16 year-old boy called Willie Francis was arrested for an unrelated matter and found to have the pharmacist’s wallet in his possession. He made two written confessions to the murder, was tried, found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair. At that time the State of Louisiana had a mobile electric chair which was moved from prison to prison and then set up and wired to the electricity supply as need arose. The nickname of this apparatus was ‘Gruesome Gertie’. On 3 May 1946 Willie Francis, who had turned 17 just a few months earlier, was scheduled to die in ‘Gruesome Gertie’. The night before the execution, the electric chair was set up by two men. The official executioner was Captain Ephie Foster and he was helped by a prison inmate named Vincent Venezia. Unfortunately, both men were drinking heavily as they prepared for the execution and as a result, the wiring was incorrectly connected.

With his head shaved, in order that better contact could be made with the electrode, Willie Francis was strapped into the electric chair on the day of his execution and the switch thrown. The result was not his death, but rather a great deal of suffering. A strong current surged through the young man’s body, but it was nowhere nearly strong enough to kill him. He thrashed about in agony, shouting for the facemask used during such executions to be removed. Eventually, when it became obvious that he was not going to die, the current was switched off and he was removed from the chair. Enormously irritated and embarrassed, the bungling executioner shouted, ‘I missed you this time, but I’ll get you next week if I have to use a rock!’ Despite a spirited appeal to the courts, Willie Francis, by that time 18, was successfully executed in the same electric chair a year later.

To understand why so many black and Hispanic prisoners found guilty of murder, rape, burglary and armed robbery were being executed in the United States, we must consider an aspect of the American judicial system which differs greatly from that of the United Kingdom. Under British law, some criminal offences were known as ‘capital crimes.’ In this context, the word ‘capital’ relates to the Latin word for head and indicates that the life of a person convicted of such an offence was forfeit. There was no leeway about this; neither the judge nor jury having any say in the sentence passed. A man or woman who had been convicted of murder, espionage in wartime or High Treason would be sentenced to death and there was an end to the matter. There was the possibility of a reprieve by the Home Secretary and the substitution of a sentence of imprisonment for life, but this was not a particularly common occurrence.

In America, the case has at various times been quite different: death being available as a penalty, but not mandatory. There is a process whereby after convicting a prisoner of murder, the jury may have a second consultation to decide upon the penalty. This, it needs hardly be said, gives ample opportunity for any latent prejudice to operate.

Most countries have one single means of carrying out a death sentence, but in the United States there have in the last thirty years or so been five methods, depending upon which state one was convicted. These are hanging, shooting, the gas chamber, the electric chair and of course lethal injections.

Hanging and shooting are the oldest means of executing a convicted criminal, but both have serious disadvantages. It was difficulties with hanging which led to the use of the gas chamber and electric chair. The reason that American hangings were often brutal affairs was that a fixed length drop was used, which might result either in the victim choking to death or having his or her head ripped off. In Britain, the length of the drop was carefully calculated in order to break the neck cleanly, but American executioners never seemed to master this art. Instead, they experimented with what might be termed ‘novelty’ gallows.

The first innovation in the construction of gallows since the invention of the long drop came in America in the early 1880s, with the development of what became known colloquially as the ‘jerk-’em-up’ system of hanging. It was thought by some that if a neck could be broken by dropped somebody with a rope around the neck for some distance, then precisely the same effect could be achieved if instead of letting the person fall, the rope itself was suddenly given a great jerk upwards. It was, superficially at least, a plausible notion but in practice hardly ever worked. Just as with the fixed drop of a traditional gallows, which of the condemned men and women strangled slowly and painfully and which died swiftly was largely a matter of chance.

The ‘jerk-’em-up’ method relied upon the use of a pulley and a very heavy weight; typically, about 350lbs or 400lbs. This was dropped from a height, with the rope attached to it. The rope ran over a pulley in a beam above the condemned person and as it fell, the other end of the rope, which was of course secured around the neck of the victim, was jerked up very sharply. To see how this extraordinary arrangement worked in practice, we cannot do better than look at a specific example; one which was to have far-reaching effects upon the way in which capital punishment in the United States was carried out in the twentieth century.

New York was keen to avoid the awful spectacle of people choking to death at the end of a rope and so in the 1880s installed a ‘jerk-‘em-up’ gallows, sometimes also known as an ‘upright jerker’. Those suffering death by means of this new device were jocularly said in prisons to have been ‘jerked to Jesus.’ The results of the gallows were disappointing. Some victims had their necks broken by it; many did not. There was increasing disquiet about the ‘upright jerker’, for it did not seem to be much of an improvement on old gallows. On 28 February 1887 occurred a hanging which was to precipitate another change is the mode of execution used in New York. This was the date when a woman called Roxana Druse died.

Roxana Druse had murdered her husband and spent the last couple of years fighting through the courts to save her own life. By the autumn of 1887, all legal avenues had been explored and her only hope was a commutation of sentence. None came and so she was taken to the gallows in front of a crowd of witnesses, including a number of newspaper reporters. Not only was her neck not cleanly snapped when she was pulled suddenly and violently into the air, but Roxana Druse spent at least 15 minutes spinning and writhing as she struggled for breath, making ghastly moaning sounds. To use an expression current at the time, ‘she died hard.’ Because so many people were present, it was impossible to hush up what had happened and there was public outrage at the thought of a woman being tortured slowly to death in this way. A more humane means of putting people to death was sought and this led to the construction of the world’s first electric chair. There were to be only two more executions with the ‘upright jerker’ before William Kemmler became the first person in the world to suffer death by judicial electrocution in 1890.

New York provides us with a classic illustration of the process which took place across much of the United States in the 50 years between 1880 and 1930, as one state after another rejected the fixed drop gallows in favour of other methods of capital punishment. It seemed so much easier to look for a more modern and up-to-date way of executing criminals, rather than simply working on and perfecting the existing method, which would have entailed studying how the long drop worked and training men in its use.

Of course, if there had not been so many witnesses to the bungling efforts of American executioners to break their clients’ necks, then none of this would have mattered. The clamour from the public, who could not be expected fully to understand the finer points of hanging, was that hanging was brutal and barbaric and that some other means would have to be found for disposing of murderers and rapists. This is why, despite its ineffective and cruel use in America, no changes were ever made in the way that hanging was carried out. It was easier just to give up the practice entirely and switch to something else.

The desire for novelty and modernity in modes of execution had a deleterious effect on hanging in the United States. The electric chair sounded very up-to-date and modern, so it became for a while the most fashionable way of disposing of criminals who had been sentenced to death. The smell of burning human flesh put some people off this method and so in 1924 the gas chamber began to be used. This was felt to be a much more hygienic and clinical way of killing people, and like the electric chair soon replaced the gallows in a number of states. It was another bungled hanging which prompted the widespread use of the gas chamber.

In 1927 a 49 year-old woman called Eva Dugan murdered the man who had employed her as a housekeeper and went on the run. By the time she was brought to trial, some months later, it had been discovered that the dumpy, middle-aged widow had been married five times, but all her husbands had vanished without trace. Whether this prejudiced the authorities against her, it is hard to say, but she was charged with her former employer’s murder and convicted. Since gaining statehood no woman had been hanged in Arizona, which meant that the forthcoming execution generated a good deal of interest.

The execution of Eva Dugan took place at a few minutes after 5:0 AM on 21 February 1930. This was a time when hangings in America were changing from being public spectacles to private affairs conducted within the walls of a prison. Although this execution was nominally private, well over 50 witnesses had been invited into the Arizona State Prison in Florence for the event. Among them were many newspaper reporters, which made what happened impossible to hush up. A number of women were among the witnesses.

Eva Dugan showed no fear as she was escorted up the steps of the gallows, which was erected in a building somewhat like a warehouse. The watching crowd saw her walk to the centre of the trapdoor, where the rope was placed around her neck. Once everything was ready the executioner pulled the lever, sending the 52 year-old woman hurtling down, until stopped abruptly by the rope around her neck. A contemporary newspaper report relates what happened at that point. According to the LA Times, ‘When the trap was sprung the first impact of the knotted rope snapped Mrs. Dugan’s head from her body.’ As if this was not horrible enough, the decapitated head bounced from the gallows and landed at the feet of the nearest witnesses; at which point three men and two women fainted.

What had happened, of course, was that the muscles of Eva Dugan’s neck had been so weak that when the jerk at the end of the rope snapped the bones, it also tore apart the muscles; meaning that there was no longer anything attaching the head to the trunk. The gruesome circumstances of the execution were soon being reported around the world. A song was even composed about the event and released as a gramophone record. The ballad, The Hanging of Eva Duggan, began by referring to the fact that she was the first woman legally hanged in Arizona;

‘Down in Arizona was just the other day,

The first time that a woman the death price had to pay,’

In Utah, the firing squad has been used for years to executed those sentenced to death. This might be a good time to pause and think about the kind of death inflicted by firing squads. There is a popular belief that being shot through the heart by half a dozen bullets must be a fairly swift way to die. After all, if the heart is torn to pieces, one must lose consciousness almost immediately and feel nothing further; or so the reasoning goes. It is not so. In fact, execution by firing squad is apt to be a protracted and painful business for the victim. We know this without a shadow of a doubt as a result of an extraordinary experiment carried out in the United States in 1938.

The first thing to bear in mind is that firing with a heavy, military rifle from a standing position, rather than laying on the ground or kneeling, is likely to be a chancy affair as far as hitting the target accurately is concerned. In warfare, this seldom matters. As long as your troops are sending a hail of bullets in the general direction of the enemy; that is all that matters. When they trying to hit a small piece of white material pinned to the chest of a man standing 20 yards away though, it can be a different matter entirely. Most readers will have heard of Eddie Slovak; the last person to executed by the United States army for desertion. When Slovik was shot on 31 January 1945, the firing party consisted of 12 men; 11 of whose rifles were loaded. Only four of the bullets hit the heart. Others struck Slovik’s arm, shoulder and neck, while others hit various parts of his torso. This was at very close range, but he did not die at once. The order was given to reload the rifles, but fortunately, by the time this was done, Eddie Slovik was dead.

How long does it take a man to die after being executed by a firing squad; one which manages to deliver most of its bullets to the heart? We know precisely and the answer is not a pleasant one. A few states in America have used firing squads as their official means of capital punishment. In one of these, Utah, a condemned man agreed to cooperate with doctors to see just what happens when somebody is executed in this way. John Deering was an unremarkable murderer who was sentenced to death for killing a man in Salt Lake City. On 31 October 1938, he faced a firing squad at the Sugar House Penitentiary, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. The prison doctor, Stephen H. Besley, asked Deering if he would help in some research which the doctor was conducting. Specifically, he wanted to connect an electrocardiogram to the condemned man’s wrists so that he could record how being shot affected the working of the heart. It was a peculiar investigation, but John Deering agreed to take part.

John Deering must have had a very lively and somewhat dark sense of humour. He was born in 1898 and executed in 1938. Shortly before his execution, he said, ‘I'm going out there and prove that those guys who said life begins at 40 are cockeyed liars.’ The readings from Dr Besley’s electrocardiogram are fascinating. While Deering was being prepared for execution by having a target pinned to his shirt, his heart was beating at a normal 72 beats a minute. Once he was strapped to the chair where he would die though, his heart-rate had soared to an almost incredible 180 beats a minute. When the five marksmen, one firing a blank round, opened fire, four bullets smashed into Deering’s chest. His heart spasmed and convulsed for a few seconds, before stopping beating altogether after 15 seconds. John Deering did not die though. For over a minute, he continued breathing and struggling against his bonds. It took him over two minutes to die; presumably in agony. This is not all the way we imagine things should be when a man has been shot through the heart!