Public Execution Quotes
Vladimir Lenin
There was, and still is in some parts of the world, this belief taht one of the main reasons for capital punioshment with visible and public executions was to deter others from comitting crimes by seeing the example of what happens to the transgressors. For these people, exemplified by this quotation of Dr. Johnson's, public executions are crime prevention. This notion tirned out to have been a fallacy. In England they found that during every public hanging, skilled pickpockets would steal from the onlookers who were tranfixed on the macabre secene--this despite the fact that pickpocketing was a hanging offence.
Public Hangings in America were not abolished for another six decades. See Quotation 644484 in Related Quotes.
This document was the first organized argument against capital punishment.
The colonial American were quite knowledgeable about trials like this one which were occuring all over Europe. The result was the demand for the First Amendment in order to ratify the original Constitution. In this particular case, the major crime that triggered the investigation and trial was the fact that La Barre did not remove his hat in respect as a religiohs procession of Corpus Christi went by. During the investigation, the mayor searched La Barre’s residence and found blasphemous literature the worst of which appeared to be Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary which the Mayor ordered to be burned along with the head and body. The photo is a plaque in Abbeville to the victim reminding all of the danger of mixing religion in civil law.
Charles Dickens himself, a true nineteenth-century liberal, lent his weight to the campaign to abolish public executions. After seeing the execution of Maria and Frederick Mannings for murdering Maria’s lover, Patrick O’Connor, in Horsemonger Lane, outside the Surrey County Gaol on 13 November 1849, he wrote this to the Times. Public hangings were abolished in 1868. The last one took place outside Newgate Prison on 26 May of that same year. The man hanged was an Irish terrorist called Michael Barratt who had blown up the Clerkenwell House of Detention killing six people. A drunken crowd stayed up all night to witness the execution. They cheered wildly when the scaffold was brought out at dawn. More people – mainly young women and children – began to arrive. By the time a bell was sounded at eight o’clock in the morning to announce the arrival of the condemned man, the crowd stretched back as far as Smithfield.
John Holloway and Benjamin Haggerty went to the scaffold on 22 February 1807 still protesting their innocence over the murder of John Cole Steele on Hounslow Heath five years earlier. They were joined by Elizabeth Godfrey who had been convicted of the wilful murder of Richard Prince the previous Christmas, by stabbing him in the eye with a pocketknife. They were hanged together. According to the Newgate Calendar, a monthly journal of the executions at Newgate Prison in London. It was first published in the middle of the 18th century and later became a monthly magazine of the most salacious crimes in England. This quotation illustrates the great popularity that public execution had become in England. The drew more spectators than athletic events, theaters, or concerts. On this occasion in 1807 there were thosands of deaths and casualties from the unrully and unsupervised mob of spectators.
