Capital Punishment

Other Voices TV: Executing Justice from PPJC Videos on Vimeo.

A conversation with J. Patrick O'Connor author of SCAPEGOAT: The Chino Hills Murders and the Framing of Kevin Cooper.

June 4, 2012

John "Babbacombe" Lee

After three attempts to hang John Lee at Exeter Prison in Devon, England, the hanging was called off. Years later he was paroled.  

by Robert Walsh 

It is February 23, 1885. The place is the coach house of Exeter Prison, Devon, England. The time is 8 a.m. 

Outside the prison, a large crowd has gathered to await the execution by hanging of convicted murderer John Lee, condemned for the brutal murder of his employer, Miss Emma Keyes, the previous year. When the execution has been successfully completed a bell will toll for 15 minutes and the dreaded black flag will be hoisted over the prison. 

At 7:55 a.m. the execution party, consisting of the prison warden, the chief guard, the prison doctor, the prison chaplain, several guards, the executioner and representatives of the press, assembles outside the condemned man’s cell. 

At precisely 8 a.m., Britain’s chief public executioner, James Berry, receives a signal from the prison governor and enters the condemned cell. He swiftly straps Lee’s arms by his sides and places a white hood over his head. Accompanied by the rest of the execution party, Berry swiftly leads the pinioned and hooded convict on to the gallows, straps his legs together and tightens the noose around his neck. Berry steps quickly off the trapdoors and approaches the lever. He swiftly pushes the lever over as he has done so many times before.

And nothing happens. 

The doors drop approximately a quarter inch, jam solid and will drop no further. Berry is slightly flustered by this, but because it has been known to happen before, he continues with his grim duty. He unstraps Lee’s legs, removes the noose and takes off the hood. He leads Lee into an adjoining room and quickly returns to examine and test the trapdoors. They are reset and the lever is thrown. 

They work perfectly. 

Berry goes into the adjoining room and brings Lee back on to the gallows. Again the hood and noose are applied and Berry throws the lever a second time. 

The doors jam solid again. 

Feb. 29, 2012

Ruth Ellis

It was a time of “no sex please, we’re British.”  Women, if they had to mention the three-letter word, preferred to spell it out in a whisper. As for men, they hypocritically joined private men’s clubs where sex was on the menu along with beer and French fries covered in salt and soaked in vinegar.  The girls who provided the sex – models they called themselves and club owners called them hostesses – dreamed of meeting a sugar daddy. One such girl – Ruth Ellis – saw her dream end on the gallows, a rope around her neck.

 By Marilyn Z. Tomlins

There is no sweet story to write about the childhood of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to hang in Britain.

Even the reminiscences of her sister, Muriel Jakubait, in her 2005 book, Ruth Ellis: My Sister’s Secret Life, could not pretend that the first years of the life of her little sister, six years her junior, were idyllic. 

Describing Ruth as dark-haired, skinny and quiet and wearing second-hand clothes, Mrs. Jakubait wrote of how the 11-year-old pre-menstrual Ruth screamed when their father abused her sexually. Muriel, also abused by their father and having borne his child, wrote: “I heard her scream … I knew what he was doing… I encouraged her not to come home straight from school … Most of the time I’d stand in front of her, screaming for him to leave her alone … Nothing stopped him …”

Ruth was born in Rhyl on the northeast coast of Wales on October 9, 1926, her parents, Bertha and Arthur, having moved to the resort not long before. Arthur – Nelson Arthur Hornby – was a cellist, working when and where he could which meant that he either provided the accompanying music to a silent movie, or he played the cello in the band of an ocean liner sailing between England and America. Bertha was half-Belgian half-French: Catholic nuns had evacuated her with other orphans from Belgium to England during the First World War. As for Arthur, he used the surname Neilson for professional reasons. This meant that Bertha also some days said that her surname was Neilson. Thus, some of the couple’s children were given the surname Neilson instead of Hornby. So was Ruth.

Nov. 28, 2011

Ana Cardona

There are over 3,500 inmates on death row in the United States, spread out over the 34 states that still use the death penalty.  Less than 1 percent of death row inmates are women and all 61 of them have been convicted of murder.

by Amanda Carlos

Since 2000, 11 states have executed 28 women. The last female executed was, Teresa Lewis, in Virginia on September 23, 2010. Lewis’s execution was controversial because her IQ score was 72 and 70 and below would have excluded her from being given the death sentence. Lewis along with two accomplices, Matthew Shallenberger and Rodney Fuller, killed her husband and stepson for insurance money. Shallenberger and Fuller were sentenced to life without parole by the same judge who sentenced Lewis to death calling her the mastermind of the murder.

Fourteen of the women on death row are there for murdering their own children.  Here’s a look at the crimes they committed.  

April 27, 2011

An excerpt from Mel Ayton recently published book Dark Soul of the South – The Life and Crimes of Racist Killer Joseph Paul Franklin

by Mel Ayton

In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for executions to start again in Missouri when it refused to hear the Missouri lethal injection case, Clemons v. Crawford. In response, Missouri's attorney general stated executions would recommence. He also said he wanted Potosi Prison Death Row inmate and racist killer, Joseph Paul Franklin, to be the first to die.

In 1977 Franklin, a self-proclaimed racist and anti-Semite, began his murder spree after concluding the organizations he had joined – the American Nazi Party, the States Rights Party and the Ku Klux Klan – were not serious enough in putting their extremist and violent beliefs into practice. Between 1977 and 1980 Franklin acted as a “Lone Wolf” assassin, roaming the length and breadth of the United States in pursuit of Jews, African-Americans and especially interracial couples whom he believed were “beasts ready for the slaughter.” In a three-year period he bombed the home of a Jewish lobbyist in a Washington D.C. suburb and a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tennessee; used a sniper rifle to kill a congregant outside a St Louis synagogue; shot and wounded Civil Rights leader Vernon Jordan; shot and paralyzed magazine publisher Larry Flynt;  killed two African-American joggers in a sniper shooting in Salt Lake City; shot and killed two young African-American boys in Cincinnati, Ohio;  successfully targeted with his sniper rifle interracial couples in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Georgia and Wisconsin; and shot and killed African- American men in Doraville, Georgia, Falls Church, Virginia and Indianapolis, Indiana. He also murdered four young women who had confessed to him they had had sexual relationships with black men.  Eventually, he was sentenced to numerous life sentences but received the death penalty only once for the 1977 murder of Gerald Gordon in Richmond Heights, St Louis. 

Despite the evil nature of his acts, Franklin became the poster boy for extremist groups around the world. His crimes were also immortalized by right wing Christian Identity fanatic William Pierce in his book Hunter, the fictional story of a “lone wolf” violent racist who targeted racially mixed couples. Internet sites proclaiming Franklin as a hero for the “cause” proliferated throughout the 1990s and beyond, promoting a message of violence and hatred towards Jews and African-Americans. It is a message which, to this day, is polluting the minds of vulnerable American youth.