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The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, And America's Struggle With The Death Penalty
Public executions were once commonplace American spectacles. In one instance, Puritan clergymen convicted and executed nineteen people for the "crime" of witchcraft. On the other side of the country many years later, San Francisco's city fathers held "official" vigilante hangings. But today, executions are rigidly controlled bureaucratic procedures authorized by the state. In The Hangman's Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty , Eliza Steelwater presents a fascinating history of execution in the United States, from colonial times to the present. With a compelling narrative and gripping personal stories, she documents how this debate became one of the most contentious of our time. The author, a veteran death-penalty researcher and co-founder of Project HAL (Historical American Lynching), shows that the answer to the death penalty's future lies in a discussion of its past. Using information from Project HAL and the authoritative Capital Punishment Research Project - including records of over 15,000 legal executions and 4,500 lynchings nationwide - Steelwater delivers a vivid understanding that America's unparalleled and powerful 200-year-old policy of execution as "punishment politics" is alive and well today. Bringing a fresh perspective to the death-penalty debate, she demonstrates that execution has often had less to do with crimes committed than with the political and economic ambitions of those who controlled the punishment system.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published June 30, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 27, 2022
Educational without being preachy. I read it a few weeks ago so the particulars are hazy but I do remember it was well worth the time I spent reading, especially as a subject that interests me.
September 5, 2014
This is more than anything a general think piece about what factors have historically played in the capital punishment debate. Steelwater's main purpose is to expand the definition of lynching, which she correctly points out has been unnecessarily limited in common usage to the extralegal executions of African-Americans. The United States has a long and well-documented history of extralegal killings that fall below most people's understanding of what qualifies as a lynching since so much of it has been carried out "in the name of the law" while simultaneously happening outside the courts.
The telling phrase that begins to emerge in the 19th century is "rescued from the authorities"; a chilling combination of words that signifies how a mob could justify acting to preserve traditional community values when the law fails to punish someone fast enough or severely enough. As Steelwater takes pains to note, the sense of outrage motivating the mob usually included a religious, moral, or racial component that gave the lynchers some sense of superiority and justification. Aside from being unprosecuted murders, these lynchings were targeted acts of domestic terror that the United States has implicitly permitted for all of its history.
Although the redefinition of lynching is her primary focus, the intent of the book is to tie America's history of vigilante violence to debates over the death penalty. In that respect the book is much less successful, never fully linking the violence of the mob in the name of justice to the similarly motivated violence of the state. The chapters move between eras of particularly notable popular violence, and describes particularly unjust legal executions, but there is not a convincing argument presented here that the two are operating according to the same imperatives. This is most apparent in the final chapter where the decline of lynching post-1960, and the absence of popular support for mob violence in general in modern day America, is contrasted to continued widespread support for America's vestigial death penalty, as though the decline in popular violence is essentially linked to popular support for state executions. That argument is never effectively laid out or explained, and although I believe that there is some reason to believe that the widespread support for capital punishment it an unthinking support that relies upon stereotyped thinking of the sort that used to support mob violence and lynchings that link is never established in this book. This book assumes that support for one variety of violence equals support for all acts of violence, and that is disappointing.
The telling phrase that begins to emerge in the 19th century is "rescued from the authorities"; a chilling combination of words that signifies how a mob could justify acting to preserve traditional community values when the law fails to punish someone fast enough or severely enough. As Steelwater takes pains to note, the sense of outrage motivating the mob usually included a religious, moral, or racial component that gave the lynchers some sense of superiority and justification. Aside from being unprosecuted murders, these lynchings were targeted acts of domestic terror that the United States has implicitly permitted for all of its history.
Although the redefinition of lynching is her primary focus, the intent of the book is to tie America's history of vigilante violence to debates over the death penalty. In that respect the book is much less successful, never fully linking the violence of the mob in the name of justice to the similarly motivated violence of the state. The chapters move between eras of particularly notable popular violence, and describes particularly unjust legal executions, but there is not a convincing argument presented here that the two are operating according to the same imperatives. This is most apparent in the final chapter where the decline of lynching post-1960, and the absence of popular support for mob violence in general in modern day America, is contrasted to continued widespread support for America's vestigial death penalty, as though the decline in popular violence is essentially linked to popular support for state executions. That argument is never effectively laid out or explained, and although I believe that there is some reason to believe that the widespread support for capital punishment it an unthinking support that relies upon stereotyped thinking of the sort that used to support mob violence and lynchings that link is never established in this book. This book assumes that support for one variety of violence equals support for all acts of violence, and that is disappointing.
August 26, 2014
This is a valuable book if you want a history of the death penalty (legal or otherwise) in the United States. My only gripe is that I wish more cases highlighting the unfairness of capital punishment were presented, but I suppose the book's anti death penalty stance would have relied too much on anecdotal/emotional evidence as a result.
December 29, 2012
Read this as part of the curriculum for my Anthropological Studies of Death and Dying class. Fascinating and worthwhile read! Very insightful into reasoning behind vigilantism.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews