MURDER & EXECUTION IN THE WILD WEST

Did the U. S. Supreme Court get it wrong? Is an execution by rope or rifle cruel and unusual? How can we reflect upon, with any degree of confidence, capital punishment in the Wild West until we have carefully examined every documented event? There were 252 legal executions in the ten jurisdictions comprising the Wild West during America’s Territorial period. In all 280 men and 2 women met death at the hands of an executioner, with 271 hanged and 11 shot.

Three methods of hanging were used and among the earliest was the rope and limb. This crude apparatus accounted for the deaths of 3 men and 1 woman before the trapdoor replaced the limb, and 213 men and 1 woman dropped to their deaths. Trapdoor gallows continued in use during the entire period, and beyond in some jurisdictions, even when a more effective method was devised. The Brooklyn plan, or “twitch-up” gallows, made its appearance in the Wild West in 1880. This gallows used a heavy weight or counter-poise attached to one end of the hangman’s rope so that, when the weight was dropped, the condemned man was jerked upwards with such suddenness that his vertebrae was dislocated. The Brooklyn plan accounted for 53 deaths.

Lethal gas or electrocution proved to be a horrible torture but a hanging or a shooting, when properly conducted, may have been the most humane method for taking a human life, even more so then the now controversial lethal injection.

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