Death Penalty News

As she is finally reburied in the same grave as her parents, those attending the reinterment ceremony say the 29-year-old was guilty of nothing more than a scandalous love affair and being a woman with 'ideas above her station' History will almost certainly record that when they sent Edith Thompson to the gallows, the case against her was wretchedly weak. So weak that it could be said her only ‘crimes’ were to fall in love with a man who wasn’t her husband, to express that love in literary flights of fantasy, and, perhaps, to be a woman with ‘ideas above her station’. It is also possible she was pregnant, which would have made her execution, on 9 January 1923, illegal. They hanged her anyway. In the eyes of the law, and contemporary popular opinion, Edith Thompson was a murderer, a woman who had incited her much younger lover, Freddy Bywaters, to plunge a knife into her cuckolded husband Percy as he walked home from an evening at the theatre on 3 October...

Lowered into an eternal tomb just a few hundred feet from their mortal cage, for some Alabama prisoners, a life sentence does not end upon death. For those who perish behind bars in Alabama without a penny to their name or family to handle their affairs, one of the state's three aging prison cemeteries often serves as a final resting place. Inmates and correctional officers can see the gravestones when they walk the prison grounds. Inmates at Limestone Correctional Facility say they avoid stepping on a large patch of grass near the prison cemetery there because of rumors that an unknown number of unmarked bodies lie below. Some prisoners mow the grass when it grows too tall between the rows of cement slabs that mark the dead. Others are tasked with digging their fellow inmates' graves, and another crew stamps names, identification numbers and dates of birth and death into the slabs. Over the years, legal advocacy groups, federal authorities and journalists ha...