Capital Punishment

Dec. 1, 2009

Clarence Ray Allen

A coward and a megalomaniac, Ray Allen gave orders that resulted in the deaths of many people.  At age 76, he was the oldest person ever executed by the State of California.

 by Randy Radic

March 14, 2005

Leo Frank (photograph c. 1915)

by Denise Noe

At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered body in the factory's basement. Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried blood, her eyes were bruised, her face scratched and bruised and some of her fingers out of joint. A piece of rope, along with a strip taken from her own underpants, encircled her neck.

In the U.S. we often pass judgment on people in other countries: Germany, for the Holocaust; Japan, for its war crimes in Asia; Stalin for his purges.

We conveniently forget our own past, however.  A past in which we enslaved hundreds of thousands of blacks -- beating them, working them in inhumane conditions, and killing them.

There are many photographs, showing crowds of U.S. citizens attending the most inhumane butchery imaginable, and getting away with it.  If you'll notice, they seem to be enjoying themselves.

This page is a reminder that the beast dwells within all of us -- Americans, Germans, Japanese, Russian and all other nationalities.  The urge to participate in butchery is not unique to any nation -- it is a universal affliction.

October 26, 2008

Entrance to HM Prison Manchester (Strangeways) where, in a special execution room, Albert Pierrepoint carried out the famous "quickest hanging" in 7 seconds. (photo credit: Stemonitis)

by Robert Walsh

by Lona Manning

Sixty-nine year-old Edgar Smith lives an anonymous existence as one of almost 160,000 inmates in the California penal system. At one time, however, he was the most famous prisoner in the United States. His story begins on the other side of the country and almost half a century ago, in the peaceful town of Mahwah, N.J. In 1957, Smith was sentenced to die in the electric chair for the murder of Vickie Zielinski, a pretty young cheerleader whose savagely bludgeoned body was found in a sandpit. The crime and the trial drew national attention. Smith claimed he was innocent and named another man as the killer, but he was found guilty and sent to the Death House in Trenton State Prison. From his prison cell, Smith managed to stave off execution with a series of appeals, and even wrote a book giving his version of the case. He began to correspond with columnist William F. Buckley Jr., who helped him overturn his conviction and negotiate a plea bargain instead of a second trial. At the time of his release in December 1971, he was the longest-serving prisoner on death row in the United States.

The lethal-injection chamber in California's San Quentin Prison.

by Robert Anthony Phillips

Timothy McVeigh was far from alone in his desire to speed up his execution date by dropping the appeal of his death sentence. There are dozens of death row inmates in the United States who have or who are doing the same thing: ''volunteering'' for death. In the last year, volunteers have been executed in Nevada, Florida, Indiana, Arkansas, Virginia, California and Oklahoma.

These volunteers get on the fast track to the death house by pleading guilty and asking for a death sentence at their trials or, most often, dropping their appeals after they are convicted.

by J.J. Maloney

More than 4,500 people have been executed in the United States since 1930. There is no way of knowing how many have been executed in U.S. history because executions were often local affairs, with no central agency keeping track of them.

In addition to judicially imposed executions,  from 1882 through 1951 there were 4,730 recorded lynchings by vigilantes in the U.S, with many of them being highly public affairs.

Even when miscreants were afforded a trial and executed in accordance with law, such events were often local in nature. For example, while states such as New York electrocuted condemned persons at Sing Sing's electric chair as early as the late 19th century, in states such as Missouri hangings were conducted at local county jails as late as 1937.