The State of Florida v Fortune Ferguson, Jr

This article uses the case of Fortune Ferguson, Jr to explore the creation and effects of the creation of a centralized justice system in Florida in the 1920s. This involved a 16-year-old Black teenager accused, convicted, and executed for rape in Florida in the mid-1920s. This represented the first person sentenced to die in the newly created electric chair in Florida’s state prison. The shift to the electric chair and state-run executions reflected a larger move by the legislature to remove criminal justice processes from the decentralized system that existed prior to 1923. This system vested significant authority in the community, local officials, and private contractors. But that system came under significant strain by the 1910s and 1920s. The shift to the electric chair and state executions emerged out of the larger critiques of the decentralized justice system. As such, this case reflects an effort to establish the authority of the new centralized system, as it was one of the first cases to be tried in it. The transition to state-run private executions was not as disadvantageous to local officials as scholars have suggested. Instead of framing the centralization of criminal justice processes as a competition between state and local criminal justice actors, the case of Fortune Ferguson provides insight into the collaborative efforts that occurred between state and local officials that augmented the authority of formal agents of criminal justice at both the state and local levels

Political science · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes · Mathematics