The End of Public Execution by Michael Ayers Trotti

Author:Michael Ayers Trotti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Debating Public and Private

The twelve states of the South shifted away from local, mixed-race, mixed-gender public executions at different times, leaving a scattering of data in both newspapers and state legislative journals regarding the impulses of legislators in these moments. While various arguments were in play, of course, the tendency in these debates was to argue that public execution was failing to deter criminals, that the state needed stronger control of the events on execution days, and that this means of control should be private executions. In particular, public executions were seen as too civil, producing little terror and thereby failing to play their designed part in preventing future crime. Table 6.1 offers the sweep of votes changing the nature of capital punishment from public to private, as well as when the practice was centralized under state authority and when electrocution became the method of capital punishment.63 The table also offers several particularly interesting wrinkles in the trends of those changes.64

Some of these votes were overwhelming and some were contentious, with the most interesting division over eliminating public execution being between the political parties. Votes for and against privacy appear to have been scattered throughout each state in ways that do not yield any geographical pattern I could discern.65 Representatives and state senators from rural, from urban, from coastal, from mountain, and from Cotton Belt counties voted for and voted against changes in the nature of capital punishment in their states.66 For several of the state votes to make executions private, party affiliations are available for the legislators, revealing that Democrats more than Republicans sought privacy in executions in the South. Democrats tended to be overwhelmingly in favor of this change, often voting 80 percent or more for ending public executions: 40–6 in the 1883 Tennessee House, for example, and 52–12 in the 1884 Louisiana House.67 Republicans, the minority party in all of these states at the time of these votes, were notably more divided over the issue, sometimes having a majority against private executions (3–4 in the South Carolina Senate in 1878, for example), and sometimes a majority voting for privacy, but with a larger number of their members in opposition: 6–4 in the Louisiana House in 1884, for instance.68

TABLE 6.1  Major state votes for changes in execution

Privacy Vote

Centralization in Penitentiary Vote

Electrocution Vote

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