Female Capital Punishment

From the Gallows to Unofficial Abolition in Connecticut

Lawrence B. Goodheart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000059786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book systematically investigates the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States over nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study, due to its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punish-ment in Connecticut in 2012.

In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the deg-radation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder, which effectively provided an es-cape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined.

The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women's studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful.

Winner of the Association for the Study of Connecticut History 2020 Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award for the best monograph on a significant aspect of Connecticut's history published in a calendar year.

Chapter 1

Consorts of Satan

Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.

Exodus 22:18

Samuel Sewall, a judge at the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials in 1692, allegedly remarked, “We know who’s who but not which is witch.”¹ His gallows humor points to the central issue of who was executed and why. Sewall, who later apologized for his prosecutorial zeal at Salem, recognized the legal challenge. Yet an emphasis placed on the exceptional events at Salem is misplaced.² Officials in the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven had anticipated Sewall’s caveat 40 years earlier. Spectral evidence was particularly nebulous and elusive according to standards of judicial proof. Some magistrates and ministers sought to harmonize the law through folk culture via the relentless coercion of confessions, which aided and abetted witch hunts. Other officials were cautious and skeptical about spectral evidence, and resolved cases of witchcraft short of the death penalty, a moderation that calmed interpersonal relations and community tension. New Haven did not execute anyone for the crime, despite some highly charged cases during the 1650s. In 1663, after much contention, Connecticut hanged the last of 11 witches, nine of whom were women. Authorities, following the New Haven precedent, blocked anyone else from going to the gallows, including those with convictions that were overturned in 1665, 1668, and 1692. The historical challenge is to understand the cultural mandate that made women vulnerable to the capital crime of witchcraft. Sewall’s pun must be taken seriously.

In seventeenth-century New England, religion and mores overlapped, reinforcing and complementing one another, including on the evil of witchcraft. The Bible recounted Satan’s numerous temptations and condemned witchcraft, the voluntary human alliance with the diabolical.³ Puritan ministers, in expansive exegesis, interpreted the Calvinistic relationship between a wrathful deity and a sinful humanity. Yet the federal theology, as comprehensive as it was, left the cause for many perplexing, everyday issues unresolved. New beer soured, breast milk dried up, infants sickened, livestock died, and dreams appeared portentous. Mysterious things happened; the explanation was not clear. It was assumed that a supernatural world existed. Cunning folk, particularly women, probed the preternatural using astrology and by casting spells, conjuring, and fortune telling. Magic might have been benign, but it was also malevolent. Personal and social relations in the close-knit Puritan village on a precarious frontier were intense. Fear, jealousy, and animosity might, particularly after a quarrel between neighbors and heightened by broader currents of unease, set the stage for accusations of witchcraft against vulnerable residents. As John Davenport warned his New Haven congregation in 1652, a discontented mind was “a fit subject for the devil to work upon.”⁴

Witch hunts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe claimed more than 50,000 lives.⁵ Much as Christians regarded the Jew as the anti-Christ, the witch was the personification of sin, the negation of holiness. Scripture condemned her. She was typically an older woman of low status and humble economic means who acquired an unsavory reputation. She was also a vulnerable woman, on the margins of society. At times of acrimony, villagers singled her out as the agent of malevolence. Like the Jew, she was believed to have unnatural proclivities and upset the normal balance of things, but she was not as easily identifiable; the witch was a covert member of the community and had to be unmasked. The New England witch hunts were a trans-Atlantic extension of the craze concentrated in northwestern Europe.

Accused as a witch, the defendant in the trial for life and death, as the Puritans described it, was confronted with sworn testimony affirming her maleficium, her devilish wickedness. Villagers and officials, especially ministers, coerced her to confess. A confession was double-edged: by admitting her guilt, she called on divine mercy to save her eternal soul, but at the same time, she legitimated the protocol that condemned her. If she was found guilty, a special sermon solemnized the event. Villagers accompanied her to the gallows at the edge of town, a boundary between civilization and wilderness, order and chaos. She ascended a ladder to the scaffold, and the constable placed the noose around her neck. Authorities, secular and spiritual, stood nearby, endorsing the execution with their presence. Curious villagers gathered about in anticipation, looking up at the high stage. Dangling in space, killed by the weight of her suspended body, she jerked spasmodically and died grotesquely. Quickly cut down, she was presently buried, probably near the gallows but not in a Christian cemetery. The sanctioned death, with its set dramaturgy, purged and purified the community of evil, or so it was hoped.

Satan, according to the lore, made unholy pacts with willing disciples, particularly women, the flawed sisters of the archetypal femme fatale, Eve. A virulent misogyny projected anxiety about sexuality and reproduction upon aged women, who were the antithesis of fecund maternity.⁶ It was not only Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fictional character, the misanthropic Goodman Brown, who saw abundant deviltry; so did King James the First and the learned Boston divines, Increase and his son Cotton Mather, who shared a passion for ferreting out the netherworld. Like those of England and Massachusetts, Connecticut’s and New Haven’s law codes made witchcraft a high-ranked capital crime. Although backed by scriptural imprimatur not to let a witch live, the judicial standard for finding a defendant guilty was ambiguous.⁷ Satan was devious, and spectral events were elusive. Fiendish trickery played havoc with legal rigor. “It is very certain,” Cotton Mather opined, “that the devills have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent, but also very virtuous.”⁸ Would the innocent be executed, while the guilty escaped? Would the devil get his due?

From the perspective of Anglo-Puritan jurisprudence, murder was relatively straightforward. There were the graphic remnants of violence: a corpse, a weapon, a perpetrator. The supernatural essence of witchcraft made this a legal quagmire. Like the otherworldly realm of the three witches in Macbeth, this was a twilight zone, a crepuscular realm that confounded empirical ways of knowing. “I’[n] the name of truth,” Banquo demanded of the weird sisters, “Are ye fantastical, or that indeed Which outwardly ye show?”⁹ Diabolical magic suspended Aristotelian logic at the heart of judicial inquiry. Deponents testified that defendants had flown, appeared as black animals, or sickened a child, statements whose corroboration rested on other phantasms. Cause and effect were open-ended. According to the classical fallacy of post hoc propter hoc, the rooster crowed, and the sun arose; ergo, the rooster caused the sun to rise. In the constricted world of the Puritan village, the witch was a scapegoat for neighborly complaints, communal stress, religious schism, and larger patterns of discontent. Witchcraft jurisprudence pivoted on an elusive epistemology. No other capital crime so challenged routine standards for admissible evidence.

Based on courtroom experience, in which lives hung in the balance, officials sought to make the diabolical bend to demonstrable proof. After all, rational-minded theologians had bound a deus absconditus to various covenants: essentially contracts in which the reciprocal relationship of an omnipotent deity and sinful humanity were inextricably tied. Important as they were, ministers and magistrates were not exclusive historical agents. Nor were the accusers. The condemned, who refused to confess, even as they stood on the gallows with their eternal souls in the balance, were heroic in challenging the verdict. Husbands who filed suits of slander against the defamers of their wives, and others who defended the accused, sought to derail the juggernaut. In the broad scheme of things, the dissenters, especially the maligned women who refused to quietly accept their fate, were, without conscious intent, subverting the capital code.

The prime evidence of guilt was a “voluntary confession.” This kind of open admission confirmed the reality of witchcraft. Connecticut and New Haven, by statute, banned the torture of defendants. In contrast, grim-minded, European inquisitors cruelly justified the rack and thumbscrew in order to save the immortal soul of the witch. For New Englanders, physical abuse not only rendered the truthfulness of statements suspect but degraded the rule of law and the sanctity of the biblical commonwealth. The putative admission of guilt was further subject to evaluation by magistrates and ministers as to its truthfulness. As the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), people charged with crimes and under a state of emotional duress might confess to authorities about actions they did not commit, even without direct corporal mistreatment. Puritan officials had the obligation to forestall a miscarriage of justice. Nonetheless, at the local level, defendants were subject to overwhelming community pressure to confess. Delegations of citizens and ministers repeatedly visited the defendants in jail and demanded that they do so. Several women did and were hanged.

A second standard for conviction was “the good and honest report” of two witnesses under oath before a magistrate, verifying the practice of witchcraft. Such testimony might demonstrate three points of evidence: the accused had made a pact with the devil; the accused had entertained a “familiar,” meaning the devil in the form of a cat, mouse, or other “visible” creature; and the accused had performed various examples of diabolical enchantments. The problem was that the devil acted covertly, and his machinations were “difficult things to prove.” Judicial rigor cautioned “jurors, etc. not to condemne suspected psons on bare prsumtions without good and sufficient proofes.”¹⁰ This articulation from notes by William Jones, a deputy governor of Connecticut, probably during the trial of Mercy Disborough in 1692–1693, crystallized concerns about standards of proof that had existed for decades.

Furthermore, state historian Walter Woodward has brilliantly shown that John Winthrop, Jr., long-term governor of Connecticut (1657, 1659–1676), as his father was of Massachusetts, and the Reverend Gershom Bulkeley, physicians and alchemists, further undermined the pertinacity of spectral evidence in the mid-1660s. Sworn testimony about the preternatural, even as Jones qualified it, was admissible and might well be demonstrative of guilt. Based on their own formidable scholarship and connection to elite networks in the Atlantic world, Winthrop and Bulkeley did not ques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Consorts of Satan
• 2 Witch Hunt in the Colony of Connecticut, 1647–1670
• 3 The Waning of Witchcraft
• 4 Black Girls and the Gallows
• 5 The Peril of Bastard Infanticide
• 6 The 1846 Murder Statute and Life in Prison
• 7 Lydia Sherman, “The Modern Lucretia Borgia”
• 8 The Female Exemption after 1900
• Epilogue: From the Gallows to Unofficial Abolition during Four Centuries
• Bibliography
• Index