Intelligent and Civilized Sentiments

This chapter tells the history of some of the elements that contributed to the declining use of the death penalty in North Carolina. Journalist Nell Battle Lewis railed against the practice as racist, un-Christian, and barbaric. Paul Green echoed those sentiments as he campaigned to save death row inmates from death. Yet their activism had little tangible result. More significant was a change in state law that allowed juries to formally recommend mercy following a conviction, meaning that judges were no longer required to deliver mandatory death sentences. The end of the mandatory death sentences ended executions, which ceased in 1961 and would not resume until 1984.

An Emotional Craving

As the death penalty was falling out of use in North Carolina, the civil rights movement was underway. In 1972, the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as practiced was unconstitutional. Politically conservative North Carolinians who viewed the Supreme Court as a weapon of liberal overreach reacted by reinstating the mandatory death penalty and ultimately adopting the bifurcated sentencing protocol now in use around the country. The renewed interest in the death penalty emerged from the tough-on-crime rhetoric adopted by conservatives and the Republican Party during and after the civil rights movement. North Carolina resumed executions in 1984.

Conclusion

This chapter theorizes the death penalty as an outcropping of our political failings and our desire to fix failing institutions rather than eliminate them. It argues that the death penalty has failed by any reasonable measure, but also that this failure is a normal feature of institutions. It lays out the different kinds of failures the death penalty has undergone: to punish fairly, to punish painlessly, to bring resolution to victims of crime, to have any effect at all on crime rates. Today’s death penalty even fails to execute, as there have been no executions since 2006.

Introduction

The introduction frames the themes and subjects of the book, including racial discrimination, cruelty, advocacy movements, and reform. It briefly outlines the history of the death penalty in North Carolina before and after the Civil War and describes the growth of the state’s incarceration infrastructure, including Central Prison, where death row is still located.

I Cannot Allow This Boy to Be Executed

This chapter explains how executive clemency—the state governor’s power to reduce a death penalty to a lesser sentence—helped make capital punishment function in North Carolina. With mandatory death sentences for four serious crimes (murder, rape, burglary, and arson), judges had no choice but to pronounce a death penalty upon conviction. This left it up to the governor to decide whether or not the convicted person would be executed. Although this power was reserved for the governor, it was soon transferred to a parole board, which reviewed each death sentence and invited community comment. This process most benefitted teenagers and women. Perversely, more African Americans received commutations than whites because of the high rate of error in their trials.

Without Howling, Without Squirming

This chapter explores the drive to make execution painless for the condemned and easy for executioners and witnesses. When the state of North Carolina took responsibility for capital punishment from county sheriffs, it introduced the electric chair. When that failed to produce a swift and spectacle-free death, the state constructed a gas chamber. The search for a reliable, quiet, and painless method of execution sapped most of the activist energy around the death penalty, transforming its form but never its function.

The General Sense of Justice

This chapter explores the enduring relationship between lynching and capital punishment in North Carolina in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Lynching was an essential way North Carolinians communicated their racial animus to official state actors, who responded with legal lynchings—the unfair trials of African American defendants before all-white juries. The threat of lynching hung over many death penalty trials. The starkly racist application of the death penalty pleased lynch mobs because of its hostility to Black people, and pleased state officials because of its apparent orderliness.