USA----book review
The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution And America's
Struggle With The Death Penalty By Eliza Steelwater, Westview
Press, Boulder, Colo., 280 pages, $26
Reviewed by Norman L. Greene
New York Law Journal
May 21, 2004
"The condemned man ... struggled and strangled for five full
minutes at the end of the rope. Only then did he become
unconscious and slowly suffocate. Imagine you are one of the
spectators and try timing a period of five minutes."
The Hangman's Knot is a fast-moving history of capital punishment
in the United States, from the days of the Puritans hanging witches
until modern times, including Illinois Governor George Ryan's 2000
declaration of a moratorium against capital punishment and his
2003 evacuation of death row through mass clemency. It also
covers the Columbia Law School study on the enormous rate of
error and reversals in capital cases, and the position of Attorney
General John Ashcroft, a "morally self-assured supporter of capital
punishment" who is compared to Puritan minister Cotton Mather.
According to the author, both Ashcroft and Mather weigh "the value
of a condemned prisoner's life to them against the value ... of their
public standing and their careers."
Capital punishment sometimes retreats, sometimes advances
throughout the states: "A gruesome or unjust execution is carried
out; legislators vote to end the death penalty. Then a gruesome
murder occurs; legislators vote to bring the death penalty back."
The author examines the death penalty as part of a larger pattern,
including domestic terrorism, such as lynching, mob violence short
of murder to enforce public morality (termed shivaree), and acts by
the Ku Klux Klan (through its historical development via several
defined stages), as part of her effort to examine why the government
kills and why we allow it.
The book addresses other landmarks in capital punishment,
including Cesare Beccaria's 1764 essay in Europe opposing the
practice. It also covers which U.S. states abolished capital
punishment in the 1800s, with the author analyzing why they did
so while others did not. Michigan briefly replaced it with a
"substitute penalty terrifying enough to appease execution supporters,"
namely, "perpetual solitary confinement, which was capable of driving
prisoners insane."
In a discussion on crowds in the thousands attending hangings,
the author wonders what children who witnessed public executions
asked their parents at the dinner table and what their parents
responded.
Ms. Steelwater explores the move toward so-called "more
humane" executions than hanging, such as the electric chair in
the late 1800s, followed by lethal injection in the 20th century.
"Once condemned convicts could be removed to the remoteness
of the penitentiary and executed in the clean, well lighted place
provided by science, humane 'disposal' could be marketed as a
real alternative to ending the death penalty," she writes.
The celebrated death row author Caryl Chessman (executed but
not for murder); the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in the 1970s
in Furman v. Georgia abolishing executions and in Gregg v. Georgia
reinstating them, followed by Gary Gilmore's post-Gregg execution
in Utah; and Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's late public
rejection of capital punishment as a failed experiment in the 1990s
are also explored.
As for those executed by injection, Ms. Steelwater writes,
"[e]xcept for being strapped down from chest to ankles, they look
as if they are giving blood or receiving chemotherapy. ... Of course,
it's easier now because there's no mess. And it all takes place so
far away." (Mel Gibson's movie The Passion Of The Christ, in
depicting the horror of scourging and crucifixion, draws more media
coverage today than one execution by lethal injection.) The poor
and minorities of their times repeatedly occupy the wrong side of
the scaffold, executed disproportionately to their numbers.
The author cleverly captures a clich=E8d death penalty debate,
featuring Mr. Prosecutor against a so-called death penalty activist.
Mr. Prosecutor, "a youngish man in a pearl gray suit and a red
power tie....His theme is 'the worst of the worst.' " That's who the
state executes now, he says, and our state's legal process is the
best in the nation." In her response, the activist makes a single
point, that "almost everyone who's executed today is poor."
Some stylized debates have become tiresome, partly since the
arguments are repetitive, partly because credible supporters of
the death penalty are difficult to find. Stagers of such debates may
have to content themselves with death penalty advocates who
also bear the mark of reformers (for example, they support the
death penalty but for fewer people or only after the system is reformed
to make it fairer by reclassifying those qualifying for death).
The best death penalty panels may not be debates at all, but
rather discussions on areas of potentially common ground -- how
to improve prison conditions, the lot of victims and victims' families,
and compensation for the wrongfully convicted, considerations
extending beyond death row.
Indeed, even if capital punishment were to disappear today, the
author recognizes that the remainder of the criminal justice system
and its intended (excessive sentences in some cases, deplorable
prison conditions) and perhaps unintended cruelties remain in
place. Commenting on the vast numbers of non-capital prisoners,
the author writes, "Executions today are the tip of America's
punishment iceberg." She also assails society's abandonment of
crime victims: "Will we just go on offering death sentences to
'console' a very few of the survivors, and let the rest get on alone
as they best can?"
Ms. Steelwater's probing inquiries and observations are
reminiscent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's chapter on capital
punishment in The Gulag Archipelago. The Gulag on death row:
"What is it like for people to wait there? What do they feel? What
do they think about? ... And what is it like when they are taken
away? And what do they feel in their last moments?" On the
submissiveness of death row inmates faced with execution:
"And almost always a person obediently allows himself to be
killed. Why is it that the death penalty has such a hypnotic effect?
=2E... When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?"
On the ironies of Russian Empress Elizabeth's replacement of
execution "with flogging with the knout; tearing out nostrils;
branding with the word 'thief'; and eternal exile in Siberia. ...
And perhaps the prisoner condemned to death today would
voluntarily consent to that whole complex of punishments if only
the sun would continue to shine on him; but we, in our
humanitarianism, don't offer him that chance."
The strengths of death penalty histories such as The Hangman's
Knot lie not only in how well they tell a story but also in how well
they ask questions and convey the meaning and feeling of
impending execution and death. Ms. Steelwater occasionally
confuses us when she makes vague statements such as in her
last chapter, "The Endless End of Capital Punishment," that
"[a]t times and places where we have had cause to believe most
strongly in our own possibilities and worth, we have had the least
need to punish." But she engages us when she vividly recounts
instructions for a hanging of strapping the "man's hands straight
down on his sides, so his elbows will not strike against the sides
of the trap as he drops through." The author is at her best when
she takes us close to executions, or in her own words, when she
writes of the hangman's knot.
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Norman L. Greene, a member of Schoeman, Updike & Kaufman,
LLP, is the immediate past chairman and a current member of the
Committee on Capital Punishment of the Association of the Bar
of the City of New York.
