Executions in America

Cries of “Down in front!” resounded, and the waters around Bedloe’s Island were packed with sightseers on boats. They came to see federal prisoner Albert W. Hicks being hanged -- arrow shows gallows at upper left of photo -- on this beautiful July day in 1860.

Today, Bedloe’s Island is called Liberty Island, home of the Statue of Liberty since 1886. Federal executions are now held inside penitentiary walls near Terre Haute, Indiana. Latest to die was decorated Gulf War veteran and Master Sergeant Louis Jones, Jr., on March 18, 2003. The public was not invited to watch.

Ironically, penitentiaries were invented about 1800 in order to “reclaim rather than to destroy.” By 1864, penitentiaries began to be the scene of executions. In contrast to county jail yards, penitentiaries provided complete seclusion from uninvited sightseers as well as the space for the long drop considered essential for a “humane and scientific” hanging.

Executions once were held on Boston Common -- also in Jackson Square in New Orleans’s French Quarter. But no executions ever took place at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, opened in 1829 as a model place of repentance in captivity. When the state of Pennsylvania began penitentiary execution in 1915, they installed an electric chair within the walls of Western State Penitentiary (now called the State Correctional Institution at Rockview), located far from Pennsylvania’s centers of population.

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