Death Penalty News

Four conspirators in President Lincoln’s assassination are hanged July 7, 1865. It was a blazing hot July afternoon, and the condemned were led in irons from the Washington penitentiary about 1 p.m. They passed the pre-dug graves and the stack of gun crates that would serve as their coffins and climbed the steps of the wooden gallows that had been built overnight. Shuffling onto the crowded platform, they were hooded and bound with strips of white cloth. Nooses were slipped over their heads. The three men and one woman had been found guilty of conspiracy in the assassination of “the late president, Abraham Lincoln,” as official documents put it. A century and a half ago this month — on July 7, 1865 — one of the last grim scenes in the tragedy of the Civil War was played out — and caught on camera — at what is now Fort McNair, in Southwest Washington. Mary E. Surratt — the first woman to be executed by the federal government — Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt and...

(Reuters) - The day after Christmas will be somber for Dakota Indians marking what they consider a travesty of justice 150 years ago, when 38 of their ancestors were executed in the biggest mass hanging in U.S. history. Overshadowed by the Civil War raging in the East, the hangings in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, followed the often overlooked six-week U.S.-Dakota war earlier that year -- a war that marked the start of three decades of fighting between Native Americans and the U.S. government across the Plains. President Abraham Lincoln intervened in the case, demanding a review that reduced the number of death sentences. But he allowed 38 to be executed, including two men historians believe were hanged in error, even as he was preparing the Emancipation Proclamation to free black slaves in the South. This month, in an annual event that started in 2005, some Dakota are making a 300-mile trek on horseback in frigid winter temperatures to revive the memory of t...