Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Penalty of Death

The Salem Statesman Journal reported this week that Marion County prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty in their case against Bruce and Joshua Turnridge, who are accused of aggravated murder in the deaths of two police officers in a bomb explosion at a Woodburn bank last December. Aggravated murder is the only crime for which a sentence of death is allowed in Oregon, and though the death penalty and discussion about it are relatively rare in the media here, Oregon does have a long history of executions.

And some of them have fascinating stories behind them, for example:  In 1858, Portland-area settler Danford Balch's teenaged daughter Anna eloped with a hired hand named Mortimer Stump – Balch was so angry about this that two weeks later, when he ran into Stump in a Portland bar, he followed him to the Stark Street Ferry and killed him with a shotgun blast to the head. Balch was convicted of murder and then hanged on October 17, 1859 at a public gallows set up near First and Salmon Streets while 500 people looked on. If this is the kind of grisly tale that suits your tastes, you need to check out Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon 1851-1905, Diane L. Goeres-Gardner’s history of public executions in the Beaver State. In a series of short, readable chapters, Goeres-Gardner details every legal execution between 1851, when William Kendall was hanged in Salem, and 1905, when Daniel Norman Williams was hanged in The Dalles, the last man to be executed outside of the walls of the state penitentiary. (Or, if you'd rather focus on the political and legal history of executions in Oregon, take a look at A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon, by William R. Long. It's a bit more scholarly, and it focuses on the development of the institution rather than on the stories of people who were condemned to death.)

Oregon executes condemned prisoners with lethal injection, as do many other states. But lethal injection has only been widely used by government executioners in the U.S. for about 25 years – historically, prisoners have also been killed by firing squads and in gas chambers, hanged, and electrocuted. In his book Edison and the Electric Chair, Mark Essig explains that electrocution became a truly viable option when Thomas Edison, America's favorite inventor and entrepreneur, threw his weight behind the promotion of the electric chair. Interestingly, Edison was an opponent of the death penalty, but his rivalry with George Westinghouse put him under considerable financial pressure. Edison's company was providing electricity using the direct current method, which was more expensive than Westinghouse's alternating current (the system we still use today). This, Essig argues, led Edison to advocate for an electric execution chair using alternating current. Essig's history examines more than just the interpersonal and political aspects, though – he also provides thorough technical explanations of direct and alternating current, explains how the electric chair works, and describes the experiments that allowed researchers to develop the final model that was actually used for executions.

Not all executions are carried out within the framework of the formal legal system. Eliza Steelwater's The Hangman's Knot chronicles two parallel stories: the history of legal executions in the United States, and the history of lynching. Ultimately, Steelwater is looking to examine why the U.S. still employs the death penalty when most other democracies have long outlawed it. Steelwater is an opponent of the death penalty and it shows in her writing, but anyone interested in this history, regardless of their own political position, should find the book fascinating.