The death penalty is one of the most hotly contested issues in America today. Evidence continues to mount that many innocent people have been executed or are currently living on death row, and that minority groups and the poor suffer from a shoddy public defense system and discriminatory application of capital charges. Meanwhile, the myth of deterrence has been revealed to be false, and an increasing number of Americans are beginning to question their support for capital punishment. Legal Lynching offers a succinct, accessible introduction to the debate over the death penalty's history and future, exposing a chilling frequency of legal error, systemic racial and economic discrimination, and pervasive government misconduct. This is an essential book for readers across the political spectrum who wish to cut through the common myths and assumptions about the efficacy and morality of state-sanctioned killing.

8220;Might well convince even the staunchest supporters that America’s machinery of death has run its course. . . . The intellectual clarity of Legal Lynching and the profound moral questions it raises deserve a wide audience and demand a political response.” –*The Washington Post Book World

“Straightforward and accessible . . . This book sets out to systematically demolish the pat, common-sense myths that make capital punishment palatable.” –*Newsday

“A calmly advanced indictment of how capital punishment is applied in the U.S.”-Richmond Times-Dispatch

“The test is peppered with the agony of mangled just. As the death penalty debate grows nationally . . . the book's relevance will only grow.”-*Albuquerque Journal

*“Reads like a comprehensive speech . . . its passion and detailed arguments make the book important.”-*The American Prospect

Autorentext

Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., Jesse Jackson, Jr., and Bruce Shapiro

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

The Death Penalty and the American Past

It is August 6, 1890. Ninteenth-century America is waking up to the power of twentieth-century technology, to the first lightbulbs, phonographs, telephones, automobiles.

In the basement of Auburn State Penitentiary in upstate New York, a man named William Kemmler is bound to a chair with heavy leather straps. His journey there has attracted international attention, and this day more than 100 reporters are on hand. An illiterate who confessed to the ax-murder killing of his lover in an alcohol-sodden rage, Kemmler is the guinea pig in an unprecedented experiment: the first attempt to execute a criminal with electricity. The medieval gallows would give way to a punishment both more modern and, its proponents argued, more humane.

Among the people most anxiously awaiting the results of today's experiment are the industrialist Thomas Edison and his great rival George Westinghouse. Edison and Westinghouse have developed different electric-power systems, and Edison has been promoting his as safer for consumers. Since the Auburn electric chair's generator is manufactured by Westinghouse, Edison views Kemmler's execution as a PR bonanza, and even suggests that capital punishment be renamed "Westinghousing." George Westinghouse, for his part, is so worried about the bad press that he has poured $100,000 into Kemmler's unsuccessful legal appeals, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At a sign from Auburn's warden, a guard pulls a switch. Sixteen hundred volts of current run through Kemmler's body. His body still, the witnesses in Auburn's basement conclude Kemmler is dead-until a doctor feels a faint pulse. The condemned man begins to groan and foam at the mouth, driving sickened witnesses from the room. Quickly, the warden orders the switch pulled again; the next jolt burns Kemmler's scalp and this time, the doctor finds, he is definitively dead.

Edison, awaiting word at his home, tells reporters, "I should have been excited myself" to be at Auburn. But an electrician listed as one of the official witnesses that day has a different view. Charles Huntley, manager of the Brush Electric Light Company in Buffalo, tells reporters that the new "electric chair" is nothing short of legal torture. "It was one of the most horrifying sights I have ever witnessed or expect to witness," he says. "There is no money that would tempt me to go through the business again."

Capital punishment, at times, seems as much an unchanging fixture of the American landscape as the sheer bluffs of Monument Valley in Utah, where so many Westerns were filmed-complete with the familiar hanging scenes. Politicians make it seem as if the death penalty is part of our national heritage, as if opposition to capital punishment is nothing but an invention of 1960s liberals. "The Constitution . . . authorizes the death penalty," writes pro-execution legal scholar Ernst Van Den Haag, adding that the framers of the Constitution "did not think that taking the life of a murderer is inconsistent with 'the sanctity of life.' " Such "original intent" arguments have succeeded in many people's minds in wrapping the death penalty in the American flag.

But as the story of William Kemmler suggests, the reality is more complicated. Kemmler's story reminds us that the death penalty has evolved for reasons that often have little to do with law and order. Edison's gloating and electrician Huntley's revulsion at the dawn of the modern execution era mark the two poles of debate over capital punishment. This debate has deeply marked American history; pushing and pulling over capital punishment have played a crucial role in shaping the law as we know it today, and opposition to capital punishment is as much a part of American tradition as the Fourth of July. So it is time to retell the story:

Any discussion of the death penalty in today's America must begin with an accurate framing of the death penalty in the American past.

Capital punishment arrived on North American shores with the very first British colonists. It was scant weeks after the establishment of Jamestown in 1608 that colonists carried out their first hanging: an accused mutineer named George Kendall. British law in that period routinely handed out death sentences even for minor crimes like robbery and burglary. On paper, the colonies followed suit: "If any person commit Burglary, or rob any person, he shall be branded on the right hand with the Letter B-for 2nd offence, shall be branded on his left hand, and whipt, and for the third offence he shall be put to death," read the 1656 Laws of the New Haven Colony. In Puritan New England, the colonists added some capital offenses of their own to their so-called Blue Laws, prescribing the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, and for persistently "stubborn" children.

By the time British colonists settled in North America, capital punishment had for centuries been an escalating public spectacle in Europe. Early Christian theologians debated the legitimacy of the death penalty, and some feudal rulers such as William the Conqueror opposed its use. But by medieval times, executions-both by church and crown-became more indiscriminate, and torture often accompanied death. The number of capital crimes increased, too; in England, for example, a death writ condemning heretics to burn or drown stayed on the books from 1382 to 1677. French nobles at least had the comfort of knowing they would be honorably beheaded with an ax rather than being hanged or drawn and quartered-often how members of the lower classes would meet their demise. Women were usually strangled to death and burned to ashes out of a sense of "decency" to their gender. (It would have been improper to make a public spectacle of a woman's bare limbs, whether attached to her body or otherwise.) Henry VIII made boiling to death a legal form of execution, and more than 72,000 of his subjects wer…