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Excerpts from The Hangman's Knotfrom the book’s opening chapter
I sit at a long oak table in a quiet, high-ceilinged room. Outside on the street the sun is blinding, but I’ve been at the table for hours and I’m almost cold. I wear white cotton gloves in order not to damage the photograph I’m about to pick up. I take it by a corner and pull it from its envelope. I find myself looking down a sloping pasture on the edge of a raw mountain town. It looks like a Western mining town of the late 1800s, with its half-built, false-fronted Main Street running along a railroad track at the back of the picture. The pasture is full of people; the photographer must have stood at the top of the hill to get them all in. Some seated, some standing or perched on wagon beds, they face away from me. A child whose head comes only to her father’s waist holds his hand. Only slowly, because the photograph is grainy and the object of attention far away, I realize I am witnessing a hanging. I have also seen photographs of homicides. The archive of a city police department is enough to sicken anyone for life. The word butchery comes to mind and there are photographs that exude a stench of agony. If there is a calculus of suffering, many a victim of murder endures more than all but a few victims of legal execution. The difference is that homicide victims were killed by individuals. Execution is killing at the hands of all of us--man, woman, and child. Serving as executioners is just as much part of who we grow up to be now, as American citizens, as it was for the community members who watched George Woods die. from the chapter capital punishment, prisoners without capital, and public support for executions: In a 1998 poll, over half of those responding said they favor capital punishment even if innocent people are sentenced to death. Over half said the poor are more likely to receive a death sentence. Over half said they favor capital punishment even if it doesn’t deter crime. Over half even admitted they couldn’t afford a lawyer themselves if charged with murder. It sounds crazy. Why would people who couldn’t afford a lawyer support a penalty that, above all others, calls for a good lawyer? But people’s positions become a lot easier to understand when you realize that the people most in favor of capital punishment are those least likely--in fact, not at all likely--to be condemned to death. Those who most persistently favor the death penalty are Republicans, men who haven’t attended college, Westerners, and Southerners. Many of these poll respondents are people with higher incomes who are self-described conservatives. In fact, the death penalty--not always administered under law--played a formative role in politics in the South and West. from the chapter
the Civil War gave both whites and blacks new grievances against each other, but unequal treatment started long before: Most troubling to me is that America’s two-hundred-year history with slavery before the Civil War provided all the evil wisdom we would ever need to fight the racial war among ourselves after the official war ended. The state of Virginia around 1820 listed seventy-three capital offenses for slaves against only one--first degree murder--for white persons. This was a more extreme difference than in other states, but slaves in just about every state where slavery was legal could be, and were, executed for a greater number of offenses than whites. In the years leading up to the Civil War, discrimination in citizenship against free blacks went along with discriminatory punishment of both free and slave. Some examples of pre-Civil-War discriminatory laws that whites made to target free blacks outside the South:
from the chapter Governor George Ryan wasn’t the first Illinois governor to find injustice in the death sentences of some prisoners: If we could time-travel back to the 1880s, either in America or in Europe, I think we’d easily recognize the national mood. Terrorism was in the air, and nobody was sure who the enemy was. Tensions went over the top when Tsar Alexander of Russia was killed by an anarchist’s bomb in 1881. Dating back to the 1830s, anarchist thought was driven by resistance to the rise of industrial capitalist power. Anarchist practitioners made up a broad river of humanity including pacifist vegetarians and founders of utopian colonies, naive or disaffected painters, poets, songwriters, and other artists, paid and amateur political assassins, and labor organizers--some violent and some not. On May 3, 1883, police killed two unarmed strikers at the McCormick Reaper plant. The next night, protestors held a public meeting to denounce the killing. Toward the end of the protest, 180 police officers marched to the meeting place, which was Haymarket Square, near the Chicago city hall. The officers massed in formation in front of the protestors’ impromptu speakers’ stand. As soon as the police commander ordered the crowd to disperse, someone threw a bomb. Police arrested several dozen political radicals. The trial that began on June 21, 1886, generated thousands of pages of transcript, and ended in conviction of all defendants. Human rights activists and others from around the world called for clemency, but the U. S. Supreme Court denied a final appeal on November 2, 1887. Two prisoners had their death sentences commuted to prison terms. On the day before the execution, one defendant managed to kill himself by lighting a blasting cap in his mouth. Four other defendants died next day before an invited audience on the gallows inside Cook County jail. But the story still hadn’t ended. In 1893, Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three convicted defendants who remained in prison. Altgeld analyzed the trial transcripts in detail to show that the judge was biased, jury selection was rigged--even allowing friends of the dead policemen onto the jury--and reputable individuals believed the main prosecution witness was a notorious liar.
from the chapter history shows that public standards can “evolve” in more than one direction: William Henry Furman, with an IQ of 65, was a twenty-five-year old
African-American. In 1968, he was convicted of murdering a white Coast
Guard petty officer, father and stepfather of ten children, while burgling
the victim's home. In appealing Furman's death sentence, his attorneys
objected to the fact that Furman's jury had been given unrestricted
discretion to choose the death sentence or life in prison. The attorneys
argued that because the decision wasn't based on criteria, or on a
principle of some kind, it violated Furman's right to due process and also
made the resulting sentence cruel and unusual punishment. The majority--consisting of justices Brennan, Douglas, Marshall, Stewart, and White--held in five separate opinions that capital punishment was contrary to present standards of decency, offered no deterrent advantage over imprisonment, and was applied capriciously and unfairly, especially against minorities. Death penalty abolitionists were jubilant. The head of the Legal
Defense Fund declared that there would "no longer be any more capital
punishment in the United States," and another commentator called the
decision "inevitable." But execution today isn’t even repression. It’s mere symbolism. The fewer we execute, the more obvious this reality becomes. Lately, it’s also become more obvious as we find out how many we’ve executed are actually innocent. ©2003, Eliza Steelwater. Web site design by T2Designs.com. Site Map |
