executions was not immediate or fully effective in dissuading the public from participating in executions.66 When the state’s preferred method of execution switched from hanging to the electric chair, the possibility of execution as public spectacle finally ended. The electric chair necessitated an indoor venue and a specially-trained executioner. Alabama and most other states also moved all executions to a single location, which removed the execution from the local communities who demanded vengeance through these executions.
Due Process Under the authority of both the Fifth and especially the Fourteenth Amendments, all criminal defendants are guaranteed due process of law. Due process includes specific legal procedures like the right to present a defense in court, but it also establishes protections for the basic rights of criminal defendants. Despite these protections, Black defendants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century South entered a legal system that was stacked against them. Each stage of the capital criminal process involved the same cast of characters who would form a potential mob to lynch the suspected perpetrator. Because Black residents were
Thomas Nast / Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 5, 1868
excluded from the jury pools of Alabama, the people who were likely to serve on the grand and petit juries and hear the facts of the case were part of the white community whose members demanded swift punishment for the offenders. It was not unusual for the lynch mob members to influence the proceedings of the local legal system. Members of a lynch mob had already decided the accused was guilty, and they were not hesitant to demand swift convictions and executions of criminal defendants. When community members wanted to kill a person accused of a crime, the sheriff, judge, and jury were often more likely to expedite the existing legal processes and arrive quickly at the violent outcome demanded by the mob. The state perhaps viewed these executions as deterring lynch Legal Executions in the Era of Lynching
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