Lawrence B. Goodheart. The Solemn Sentence of Death

Unlike all its New England neighbors, capital punishment is and always has been legal in Connecticut. Yet in modern times a contradiction has resulted. The death sentence is on the books, but it has only been carried out twice since 1960, and both times the person executed wanted it. This peculiar set of historical circumstances is at the core of Lawrence B. Goodheart's comprehensive examination of capital punishment in Connecticut since 1636. In it we learn something about all of the 158 people put to death by the state in its history, and a number of others who were spared execution after receiving the sentence. Along the way Goodheart tells us some fascinating things. For example, the rejection of evidence by the court in the reversal of the last witchcraft convictions in 1692 was based on its substantive inadequacy, not procedural error. Before that nine women and two men were hanged for it, the last in 1663. Nine of the nineteen women executed in the history of Connecticut were convicted of witchcraft. Also, non-whites were overrepresented among the executed from 1700–1782, when nine of the ten were Indian or black. The original creation of degrees of murder in 1846 was a compromise designed to limit but protect capital punishment from its increasing number of critics. As recently as 2005, among the roughly half the population that supported capital punishment, fifty-seven percent did so for reasons of retribution and only ten percent for deterrence.

Algorithm · Ancient history · Capital (architecture) · Capital punishment · Compromise · Contradiction · Criminology · Deterrence (psychology) · Economic Justice · Linguistics · Political science · Population · Punishment (psychology) · Retributive justice · Sentence · Sociology · State (computer science) · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies