America wants to bring the gallows back to the streets. The death penalty in the age of streaming

At 5:23 a.m. on 14 August 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea sat at the foot of the gallows and asked to change his socks. His hands were cuffed. The process took some time. He pulled a fresh pair out of his pocket, left his old shoes and socks at the foot of the ladder, and climbed twenty-one steps, gazing at the dawn breaking over the River Ohio. Beneath the tall wooden gallows stood ten thousand or twenty thousand people: the newspapers of the time gave varying figures, as is always the case when it comes to estimating the size of a crowd. Above, a drunken former policeman was supposed to pull a lever but stood motionless, confused as he was by the effects of alcohol. After a few moments of chaos, with the authorities shouting orders, it fell to an unnamed deputy sheriff to lean on the lever. The condemned man fell some two and a half metres, breaking his neck. The death certificate recorded the time of death as 5.45.

Bethea was a 22-year-old Black man; the victim was Lischia Edwards, a 70-year-old white woman who had given him a job in her home. The trial lasted three hours, with court-appointed lawyers representing the defendant, who, at the time of his arrest, had confessed to the offences of burglary, rape and strangulation. The prosecution, however, charged him only with rape. The jury of twelve white men took four and a half minutes to reach a verdict. For murder, Kentucky prescribed the electric chair in Eddyville, far from public view. For the rape, on the other hand, a public hanging was scheduled in the county town. But after the macabre spectacle of that long night – with people having travelled from all over Kentucky to enjoy the show in an atmosphere of public lynching – it was decided that, from then on, executions would no longer take place in the town square.

It has been since that dawn in 1936 that America has not publicly executed anyone. Ninety years on, Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon, has reopened the wound and reignited the desire amongst a section of the country to turn death into a spectacle of vengeance. The self-proclaimed ‘Minister of War’ announced in recent days his intention to carry out, via a livestream open to the whole world, the execution of Nidal Hasan, a former Army major who in 2009 killed 13 people and injured 32 in a jihadist massacre at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. The execution is scheduled for 3 December, but even President Donald Trump, after a few days’ reflection, felt the Pentagon’s decision was excessive. Execution, yes, but no live streaming. “I believe it would have served as a powerful deterrent, showing the world how America deals with terrorists and scum like Hasan,” said Trump, adding, however, that “many decent, well-meaning people would prefer not to see him die, either via livestream or through any other visual medium”.

So, no public execution, but Hegseth’s decision to reinstate a military firing squad remains – a practice the armed forces abandoned in 1945. The soldiers will have to kill Hasan, most likely by shooting him whilst he faces them seated in a wheelchair: the former major is paraplegic as a result of the 2009 shooting. The Pentagon chief’s plan is to carry out a biblical ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ on the very same base and at the very same time as the massacre took place.

Streaming would have been the 21st-century digital version of ‘picnic hangings’, as the press described the 1936 hanging in Kentucky (as recounted in Sonya Lea’s book American Bloodlines) and the long and tragic history of public executions that has accompanied America since colonial times. Punishing someone with death in front of an audience has always been a powerful temptation for the Puritan spirit of the New World and has often spilled over into the racial hatred of public lynchings targeting Black people and immigrants. Hegseth has reignited a debate about the United States’ past. In recent decades, the appetite for the gallows has been managed by concealing executions, confining them to the death chambers of maximum-security prisons and resorting to methods deemed less inhumane than hanging or firing squads, such as the use of the electric chair, the gas chamber and lethal injection.

But even away from the public eye, executions have continued to prove embarrassing for the authorities. Partly due to miscarriages of justice, partly due to the failure to abolish the death penalty in favour of life imprisonment, and to a large extent also due to the failure of the more ‘humane’ methods that have been attempted. According to calculations by Austin Sarat and his study “Gruesome Spectacles”, out of 8,776 executions between 1890 and 2010, 276 went wrong – around 3 per cent. With lethal injection, the figure rises to 7 per cent, the highest rate of all methods. While the Fort Hood case has brought public executions back into the spotlight, the story of Christa Pike has raised new questions about the methods used away from the public eye, in death row cells. On 30 September last year at Riverbend Prison in Nashville, 50-year-old Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital. She ended up in intensive care for several days, intubated, with her arms burnt and covered in blisters. When she recovered, she was returned to her cell. She was due to be the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820. Instead, she has now become a national cause célèbre, with Governor Bill Lee deciding to suspend all executions and ordering an independent inquiry.

The Hasan and Pike cases are merely the latest chapter in the long and complex history of the relationship between America and capital punishment. The first chapter was written by a firing squad. In December 1608 in Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in Virginia, Captain George Kendall, a member of the governing council, was shot on charges of mutiny and spying for Spain. Four years later, Governor Thomas Dale codified the death penalty and extended it to include the theft of fruit or the killing of a chicken without permission. In Puritan New England, the gallows became a school of morality. Hangings took place in public; the minister would preach on sin in front of the condemned man, and the crowd was called upon to see themselves reflected in him. In Salem, in 1692, nineteen people accused of witchcraft were hanged.

Then came the Enlightenment, and it arrived almost in real time. Cesare Beccaria’s "Dei delitti e delle pene", published in Livorno in 1764, was translated into English three years later and reprinted in New York and Philadelphia. Jefferson copied twenty-six passages from it, in Italian, into his notebooks. John Adams quoted it in court to defend the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. But the Founding Fathers interpreted it in their own way. Jefferson’s draft constitution for Virginia restricted the death penalty to murder and treason, and prescribed castration for rape. It was rejected nonetheless, by a single vote: according to Madison, due to ‘anger against horse thieves’. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, argued that executions increased crime rather than deterring it, because they accustomed people to violence. In 1794, Pennsylvania introduced degrees of murder and reserved the executioner solely for the first degree.

The decisive turning point came in 1834, again in Pennsylvania, the first state to move executions within the prison walls. It was not out of pity for the condemned man. The respectable classes in the cities of the North had become convinced that the crowds on hanging days – comprising drunks and pickpockets – were more likely to be corrupted than to be edified. The historian Louis Masur has reconstructed this transition in "Rites of Execution", and it can be summarised as follows: America concealed executions in order to preserve them. In 1846, Michigan went a step further and abolished the death penalty for all offences except treason. The South was a different story. There, the public gallows survived for a long time, and alongside the legal gallows, lynching flourished.

Technology also soon entered the fray, promising a ‘cleaner’ method of execution. In 1890, the State of New York executed William Kemmler in the first electric chair, at the height of the ‘War of the Currents’ between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. In 1924, Nevada experimented with gas on Gee Jon, a Chinese immigrant. The 1930s, the decade of Bethea’s life, saw the highest number of executions in American history, averaging 167 a year, with a strong racial dimension. Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Justice of the Supreme Court, would recall this in his opinion for the 1972 Furman v Georgia judgement: since 1930, the United States had executed 455 people for rape. Forty-eight were white, 405 were Black. Rainey Bethea was one of them.

After the war, the tide turned. Executions declined and in 1966 Gallup recorded the lowest level of support ever measured, at 42 per cent. After 1967, no one was executed. Lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defence Fund had chosen to challenge every single conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. On 29 June 1972, in the Furman ruling, the Court held by a five-to-four vote that the death penalty, as it was being applied, was unconstitutional. The nine justices wrote nine different opinions. Forty state laws were struck down and 629 condemned prisoners had their sentences commuted.

It seemed like the end. It lasted four years. Thirty-five states hastily rewrote their laws and in 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court upheld them. On 17 January 1977, at Point of the Mountain prison in Utah, Gary Gilmore waived his right to appeal, demanded to die and sat before a firing squad. His last words were “Let’s do it”. Norman Mailer based his novel The Executioner’s Song on this. America was resuming its killing where it had begun – with guns. But now it needed a new reason to do so. It would find it some twenty years later, in a word borrowed from the vocabulary of therapy.

The true essence of the American drama surrounding the contemporary death penalty can be summed up in one word: closure. It is difficult to provide an Italian translation that fully captures its meaning, but it refers to bringing something to an end, completing a process and drawing it to a close. The death penalty in the United States today is largely underpinned by the concept of ‘closure’, one of the terms most frequently used by governors and prosecutors to justify their ‘no’ to any act of clemency towards the condemned. Execution is the conclusion that the victims’ relatives and public opinion are waiting for, to restore a sense of justice. It is somewhat in the spirit of the American Old West: if you have killed, you must be killed. You cannot get away with life imprisonment, and there is no room to consider the possibility of redemption. The rehabilitative function of punishment is not an American concept.

And yet it is a relatively recent term. According to the legal scholar Franklin Zimring, prior to 1989, ‘closure’ and ‘death penalty’ never appeared together in American newspapers. In 2001, there were more than five hundred such references. That year, Attorney General John Ashcroft arranged for the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, to be broadcast via closed-circuit television to 232 survivors and relatives of the 168 victims. He wanted to help them, he said, “to bring this chapter to a close”. Bud Welch, who had lost his daughter Julie in the bombing, objected: it was revenge and hatred, he said, that had killed her and the others.

Hegseth and a large section of public opinion that shares his views would now like to go further than Ashcroft. The death penalty threatens to emerge from the ‘death chamber’ – accessible only to the victim’s relatives – and return to being a spectacle for all to see. The head of the Pentagon and his admirer Josh Howerton, an evangelical pastor who justifies capital punishment by invoking biblical stonings, speak the language of public gallows. The first American pope takes a different view. On 10 October, Leo XIV wrote that the death penalty is “unacceptable because it undermines the inviolability and dignity of the person”. He did not mention Hasan and left the controversy to his own people. Paul Coakley, head of the American bishops, in response to Hegseth’s proposal, spoke of a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death”. He is the Archbishop of Oklahoma City, McVeigh’s hometown. Hasan now awaits what he believes to be martyrdom. Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times by him, would simply like to look him in the eye. The rest of the world, for now, seems to have spared itself the fate of becoming a spectator, following the death via live stream as if it were a sporting event.