The Law Librarian would be amiss in not shining some light on St. Paul attorney Deborah Ellis, who was visible in last week’s legal news for leading a legal team whose efforts brought about the overturn of the 30 year-old conviction of Louisiana death row inmate Glenn Ford. Until last week, Ford was on death row following his 1983 conviction for the murder of Isadore Rozeman. Ford always maintained his innocence, and recently discovered evidence finally showed that Ford was not in the place prosecutors previously convinced jurors he was on the night Rozeman was murdered. This fresh evidence culminated in Caddo Parrish District prosecutors requesting that the court set aside Ford’s first-degree murder conviction and death sentence, which it did. Besides these news sources, also see this blog entry from the Innocence Project.
Minnesota abolished its own death penalty in 1911, but its brief run was detailed, diverse, and divisive. There was the 1860 hanging of Ann Bilansky following her conviction for poisoning her husband to death. (Governor Ramsey expressed grave doubts as to her guilt but ultimately allowed the execution to carry out as planned.) Then there was the mass hanging at Mankato of 38 Dakota men for what authorities believed was role in the 1862 Dakota uprising. (Granted, this was a federal and not a state-ordered execution.) The swan’s song probably started to play with the 1906 execution of William Williams, whose murder of Johnny Keller and his mother was supposedly motivated by a gay love affair gone bad. His hanging was botched by miscalculation of rope length, which allowed his live body to forcibly hit the floor when the trap door was released. The rope had to be pulled up and held for over fourteen minutes before Williams was pronounced dead. Word of these technical difficulties leaked to the newspapers, and public outrage predictably followed. The Williams debacle was Minnesota’s last execution before the death penalty was finally abolished in 1911. These and other details are presented in Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) by former Minneapolis Attorney John D. Bessler, now an associate professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.
It will be interesting to see if the Louisiana Legislature does anything with their own death penalty statute following the highly-publicized justice debacle of Glenn Ford.
Fantastic entry! Thank you for addressing this with such clarity!