The Electric Chair

     Quite often the centerpiece of a police or crime museum is an electric chair. To some, "Old Sparky" is a symbol of a bygone era when convicted murderers got what was coming to them swiftly and electronically. Others believe the electric chair represents government brutality and cruel and unusual punishment. Still others are drawn to these old "hot seats" by morbid curiosity. Currently, only four states--Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Virginia--have operational electric chairs. In these states a death row inmate can choose between lethal injection and electrocution. Over the past years prisoners faced with this dark dilemma have chosen the needle over voltage. Since 1890 about 4,000 inmates have been electrocuted in the United States. It would be wishful thinking to believe that all of them were guilty of the crimes charged.

The Agent of Death

     In the 1920s and 30s, Robert G. Elliott, an electrician from Long Island, the official executioner for six states, electrocuted 387 inmates. He charged the state $150 per electrocution. When he threw the switch (or turned the wheel) on two or more at one setting (so to speak), he discounted his fee. Some of Mr. Elliot's most infamous clients included Bruno Richard Hauptmann (1936) the killer of the Lindbergh baby; Ruth Snyder and Judd Grey (1928) the murderers of Ruth's husband Albert; and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927) anarchists convicted of killing a Boston area bank guard. Robert Elliott, somewhat of a celebrity and proud of his singular contribution to the American system of criminal justice, wrote a memoir called Angel of Death that came out in 1940 less than a year after his own demise. His book, long out of print and written by a co-author, is now a collector's item.

Never Too Big to Fry

     In 1981 Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis murdered a pregnant woman and her two children during a home invasion robbery in Jacksonville, Florida. A year later a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to death. In 1998 as Mr. Davis' execution date approached, the 54-year-old death row inmate's attorney argued that his 355 pound client was too heavy for the state's broken-down 76-year-old electric chair. Since it was built in 1923, the Florida State Prison's electric chair had dispatched 200 prisoners and was worn out. Witnesses to the chair's performance in 1997 saw, when the electricity was applied, a flame from the condemned man's head shoot a foot into the air. So in 1998 following this unpleasant tableau the prison, with Allen "Tiny" Davis in mind, oversaw the construction of a new heavy-duty electric chair, one that could accommodate a 355 pound person. On July 8, 1999 the executioner ran 2,300 volts through the metal cap on Davis's head for two minutes. It wasn't pretty, there was some blood and a lot of groaning, but the new chair did its job.

Museum Pieces

     If one is interested in the chair that electrocuted Ruth Snyder and Judd Grey in 1927, a replica is on display at the Sing Sing Prison Museum in Ossining, New York. Ruth Snyder had been the first women executed in the United States since 1899. After her more would follow. The real chair is in prison storage. The chair Robert Elliott activated to electrocute Bruno Richard Hauptmann sits in the New Jersey Police Museum and Learning Center in West Trenton. They call it "Old Smokey."

     At the American Police Hall of Fame and Museum in Titusville, Florida visitors can be photographed sitting in a replica electric chair. An Old Sparky is on display in Moundsville, West Virginia as part of a tourist attraction on the site that used to be part of the West Virginia State Penitentiary. The chair was constructed in 1950 by an inmate who had to be moved to another prison when the other inmates got wind of his project. Before 1950, death sentence inmates in West Virginia were hanged--85 of them since 1866. The state has since abolished the death penalty.

     In Springer, New Mexico, at the Sante Fe Trail Museum, a female mannequin sits in the state's first and only electric chair. The electric chair at the Texas Prison System in Huntsville, built by an inmate, killed 361 prisoners from 1924 to 1964.

     The centerpiece of an exhibit at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus features an electric chair that put 312 men and one woman to death between 1887 and 1963. The exhibit, in a state that has kept the death penalty, has created some controversy.

Thomas J. Byrnes: The Father of the Third Degree

     The history of American criminal investigation does not begin with thinking detectives inspired by the fictitious Sherlock Holmes, but with a police detective who achieved fame and success by acquiring confessions through rubber hose brutality referred to as the "third degree." Although Thomas J. Byrnes is not as familiar today as the nineteenth century private investigator, Allan Pinkerton, it was Byrnes who set the stage for decades of institutionalized police brutality in the United States. It was Byrnes who practiced interrogation techniques that decades later produced the U. S. Supreme Court's Miranda decision. (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966)

     A Civil War veteran living in New York City, Thomas Byrnes joined the police department in 1863. Following a brief stint as a patrolman, the smart and ambitious young man got promoted into the newly formed detective bureau where he quickly made a name for himself. In 1880, two years after grabbing headlines for solving a $3 million Manhattan bank burglary, Byrnes, now a captain, took charge of the detective bureau made up of two sergeants and fourteen investigators. With thirty thousand professional thieves and 2,000 gambling dens, New York, one-third the size of London, had three times the crime. Businessmen in the Wall Street district overrun by sneak-thieves, forgers, pickpockets and burglars, turned to Byrnes for help. The police captain responded by putting out the word, through a network of paid informants and other law enforcement contacts, that any thief caught south of his infamous Dead Line would be sent to Blackwell's Island for a severe beating; a threat Byrnes carried out with precision and joy until the thieves, having received the message, stayed out of the financial district. The tycoons of Wall Street showed their gratitude by making Captain Byrnes one of the wealthiest police detectives in history. 

     Byrnes, as much a businessman as police detective, found other sources of income. During his tenure as Captain of Detectives he followed the standard policing practice of ignoring, for a price, the city's gambling establishments, brothels and opium dens. One the New York's most notorious madams paid $30,000 a year in police bribes.

     As an investigator Thomas Byrnes, in addition to employing a stable of paid, confidential informants, would let lesser criminals off the hook in return for evidence against the bigger fish. He taught his detectives how to identify criminals, particularly safe-crackers and other signature offenders, through their individualistic crime scene techniques--their so-called methods-of-operation or M.O. The use of informants, criminal intelligence and M.O. were tactics pioneered by Allan Pinkerton, the only investigator in the country more famous than Captain Byrnes.

     It is not surprising that Byrnes, as an ambitious, publicity-seeking detective working in an era before judicial restraints on police behavior, adapted as his principal investigative technique the coerced confession. From a brutally pragmatic point of view the beauty of the third degree was that it was not necessary in the acquisition of a confession to be interrogating the guilty party. By being the first to publicize the fact he would do whatever it took to get a confession, Byrnes established police brutality as a standard operating procedure, making himself the unofficial father of the third degree. For the next fifty some years, until the U. S. Supreme Court in1936 specifically excluded confessions extracted from physically abused prisoners, the third degree became the staple of criminal investigation in America. While Brown v. Mississippi didn't end police brutality, it marked the start of a new era in criminal investigation. However, Byrnes' ghost would inhabit, in varying degrees, interrogation rooms across the country throughout the Twentieth Century.

     Although he worked in the era before the advent of crime statistics--annual crime rates, case clearance percentages and such--Byrnes used statistics, figures no less reliable that their modern counterparts, as indices of success. At one point in his career he claimed credit for 3,300 arrests leading to an accumulated ten thousand year prison sentence. There was no telling what percentage of the men he put behind bars were innocent of the crimes charged. Aware that the investigative reputation of Scotland Yard exceeded that of his own department, Byrnes, in the wake of the 1888 serial killings of five prostitutes in East London, challenged Jack-the-Ripper to ply his trade in New York. When a gutted female corpse washed up on the New York side of the Hudson River shortly after Byrnes' bravado, there was serious concern that the ripper had taken up his challenge. As it turned out that murderer was not Jack-the-Ripper.

     Thomas Byrnes reached the peak of his fame in 1886 with the publication of a book, under his name, called Professional Criminals of America. The massive work contained the mug shots and detailed criminal histories of four-hundred of the city's most active house burglars, safe-crackers, pickpockets, check forgers and con artists. Reprinted for the first time in 1969, it is considered a classic work in the history of property crime in America.

     In 1892, a crusading Presbyterian minister in New York City named Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst launched a religious crusade to clean up vice in the city and to expose the police corruption that allowed it to exist. The crusade led to political hearings headed by a New York state senator named Lexow. In 1894, Byrnes, now a police superintendent, was called before the Lexow Committee to explain how he, a public servant, had become so wealthy. As a result of the highly publicized hearings the mayor resigned and a handful of patrolmen were indicted on charges of bribery. Byrnes, and several other police bigwigs were simply forced to resign.

     After leaving the force in 1895 the 54-year-old father of the third degree took a high paying job as general manager of an insurance company. The Lexow politicians, having enjoyed the limelight, left town, and the moment they did the corruption and vice returned.

     In America the ward and watch system of policing evolved into a better organized more efficient system of bribe giving and receiving. For the next sixty to seventy years American law enforcement would be plagued by corruption and brutality. In the late 1800s, D. J. Cook, the superintendent of the Rocky Mountain Detective Association who had been a sheriff and a deputy U.S. marshal, issued words of wisdom applicable to his time and a generation of future cops: "Never hit a prisoner over the head with your pistol because you may afterwards want to use your weapon and find it disabled."

     In 1910, the week before he died at age 69, Thomas Byrnes transferred to his wife a Fifth Avenue building worth a half-million dollars. Two years later the lawyer-writer Arthur Train, in his best-selling book, Courts and Criminals, described the status of criminal investigation some seventy years following the formation of the New York City Police Department: "The detective business swarms with men of doubtful honesty and morals who are accustomed to exaggeration if not to perjury, and who have neither the inclination nor the ability to do competent work."

America's First Bomb Murder Case

The earliest case which I have found of the use of a bomb to commit murder was in 1854, when William Arrison sent one to the head of an asylum where he had been confined.

Thomas M. McDade, The Annals of Murder, 1961

Reefer Madness

The war-on-crime atmosphere of the 1930s influenced national drug policy, solidifying the belief that drugs were a criminal rather than a medical or social problem. A national panic over marijuana broke out in the 1930s. The movie Reefer Madness, for example, offered a sensationalized picture of marijuana's allegedly evil effects. The 1937 Marijuana Tax Act established harsh penalties for the possession and sale of marijuana. Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics [now the DEA], imitated [J. Edgar] Hoover, whipping up public fears in order to build a bureaucratic empire. In a popular magazine article, "Marijuana: Assassin of Youth," he painted a terrifying picture of the "sweeping march" of marijuana addiction, causing murder, rape, robbery, and other "deeds of maniacal insanity."

Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, Second Edition, 1998

How the Automobile Changed U. S. Policing

From 1900 to 1930, the number of automobile registrations in the United States rose from 8,000 to more than 23 million. This phenomenal growth posed challenging new responsibilities for urban police departments regulating traffic, limiting parking in downtown areas, and trying to keep the killed and maimed to a minimum. The introduction and spread of the automobile obliterated the distinction between the law breaking and the law abiding. [It also led to the federalization of law enforcement.]

James F. Richardson, Urban Police in the United States, 1974

The Salem Witch Trials

The famous Salem witchcraft crisis erupted early in 1692 when several young women began exhibiting bizarre behavior: incoherent screaming, convulsions, crawling on the ground, and barking like dogs. Some people believed that the Devil himself was present in the community and blamed this on a slave woman named Tituba. The trial of Tituba and two of the young women only escalated the crisis. Suspects were encouraged to name other witches, and they responded enthusiastically. The search for witches quickly spread throughout Salem and to neighboring towns. The original girls identified more than fifty "witches" in Andover [Massachusetts], even though they did not personally know anyone in the town. By the end of the summer, nineteen accused witches had been executed, and seven more were sentenced to die...The term "witch hunt" eventually entered the American language as a description of persecution for political or religious beliefs.

Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice, Second Edition, 1998

Public Hangings in Colonial America

When executions were still public events, they provided an enormous interest. Perhaps no single event brought more spectators in those years than a public hanging. People drove for miles to be present; some camped in the vicinity for several days. The large concourse of people naturally brought camp followers to every large gathering. Entertainers, vendors, pickpockets, promoters, evangelists, sight-seers, peddlers, and medicine men would descend on the town before the fatal day.

Thomas M. McDade, The Annals of Murder, 1961

The Birth of Modern Policing

     The major revolution in American police history occurred when the historic fears of a militaristic police force were replaced by concern over daytime disorder. It was not until the mid-1840s that Americans abandoned the constable-night-watch for a police department which emphasized preventative patrolling during the day as well as at night. American cities were then experiencing a tremendous population increase. Large numbers of people who did not know how to live in congested places were flooding to the city. If they were from European cities, they interjected a foreignness into the American city which was not appreciated. Homogeneity was lost and new forms of control--proper public constraints on demeanor and behavior--needed to be enforced in the daytime.

     Police arrest reports in the late 1854 and early 1855 indicate that such offenses as drunkenness, disorderly conduct, fighting, and resisting police made up the major police problem. The old constable-detectives were too few in number for such a task, and the quest for an urban discipline inspired the creation of the modern police in the 1840s and 1850s.

Frank Thomas Morn, Pioneers in Policing, 1977

Winners and Losers in the Prohibition Era

     In 1919, the 18th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution allowed for the Volstead Act that banned the manufacture, shipping, and selling of liquor. In 1933, the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment which allowed the repeal of the Volstead Act. Americans went back to lawful drinking.

     Besides people who liked to drink, the U. S. government, during the prohibition era, was the big loser. During that period, the federal government lost $11 billion in tax revenue from liquor sales. Moreover, the government spent $300 million in a futile effort to enforce the Volstead Act.

     Prohibition's big winner ended up being organized crime. During the liquor ban, the Mafia gained a giant foothold in every major city in the country. In Chicago, gangster Al Capone earned $60 million a year providing illegal booze to thirsty Americans. Eventually the IRS brought Capone down by taking him to court for tax evasion. Scarface served eleven years at Alcatraz before he died in 1947 from untreated syphilis. Before his federal conviction, Capone virtually ran the city of Chicago.