The Rope, The Chair, and the Needle
The Rope, The Chair, and the Needle
Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990
In late summer 1923, legal hangings in Texas came to an end, and the electric chair replaced the gallows. Of 520 convicted capital offenders sentenced to die between 1923 and 1972, 361 were actually executed, thus maintaining Texas’ traditional reputation as a staunch supporter of capital punishment.
This book is the single most comprehensive examination to date of capital punishment in any one state, drawing on data for legal executions from 1819 to 1990. The authors show persuasively how slavery and the racially biased practice of lynching in Texas led to the institutionalization and public approval of executions skewed according to race, class, and gender, and they also track long-term changes in public opinion up to the present.
The stories of the condemned are masterfully interwoven with fact and interpretation to provide compelling reading for scholars of law, criminal justice, race relations, history, and sociology, as well as partisans on both sides of the debate.
A solid contribution to our understanding of the relationship between race, crime, and capital punishment in American history.
An important new book . . . the first to explore in such depth the historical continuities in capital punishment in a single state, and especially the complex part played by racism in both past and present application of the death penalty. It is must-reading for anyone who seeks to understand capital punishment in the United States.
[The authors] have produced a book that is, on the one hand, a moving human document and, on the other, a model of dispassionate analysis. Readers will feel for the victims of the death penalty, whose humanity is glimpsed in their diaries, in their last words, and in pathetic pleas for clemency made on their behalf by loved ones. Equally, readers will be repelled by the patterns of bias in the administration of the death penalty so clearly reflected in social science tables. The authors have done us a great service by adding both detail and nuance to our knowledge of the human foibles and fallibilities of our justice system, which are revealed so glaringly when we presume to mete out final punishments.
James W. Marquart is Professor of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Sheldon Ekland-Olson is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Jonathan R. Sorensen is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas, Pan American.
- Preface
- Chapter 1. From Lynchings to Electrocutions
- Chapter 2. The Initial "Harvest of Death": 1924-1972
- Chapter 3. Rape, Race, and a "Peculiar Chivalry"
- Chapter 4. Capital Murder and Midnight Appeals
- Chapter 5. Spared the Chair and Sentenced to Life
- Chapter 6. Adoption of Lethal Injection and Contemporary Death Rituals
- Chapter 7. Stages of Sentencing and Future Dangerousness of Convicts
- Chapter 8. Some Closing Thoughts
- Appendix A. Statute Providing for the Electrocution of Convicts Condemned to Death
- Appendix B. Death Row Prisoners, 1923-1988
- Appendix C. Post-1974 Department of Corrections Procedures for the Execution of Death-sentenced Inmates
- Notes
- References
- Court Cases
- Index
