New Hampshire abolished execution today. Good news. It's worth thinking for a minute about the history of death penalty abolition, lest we think it's a product of our recent wokeness.

#deathpenalty thread. Should be grading papers so it'll be long.

appealpolitics.org/2019/new-hamps…

Enlightenment Americans wanted to set America apart from Old Europe, and thought banning the death penalty would be a good way to do it. Thomas Jefferson tried to further limit Virginia's death penalty to murder and treason. The measure failed by one vote.

American thinkers like Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, John Adams, and others were all reading an exciting new zine by Italian thinker Cesare Beccaria, which, among other things opposed capital punishment because it was a tool of dictators.

Rush convinced leaders in PA to ban it except for murder in the late 1700s. Michigan: same thing in 1846. A few states got rid of it then brought it back in the early 1900s, including Tennessee in 1913!

abcnews.go.com/US/death-row-i…

20th Century, most states--especially those wanting to seem modern--had enough shame to make their death penalties private and appear painless. A dentist experimented with killing dogs w/ electricity, hoping they'd die "without howling, without squirming." Electrocution is born.

Finding painless, invisible forms of execution offers a tempting alternative to abolition, since lots of the unease about execution is about botched hangings, people catching on fire in the electric chair, etc. Activist energy is coopted into institutional reform.

Activists kept activating, of course. The playright Paul Green called out execution as "murdering ignorant [N]egroes."

Nell Battle Lewis wrote in 1935 that to execute criminals was "as stupid and inexcusable as it would be for a doctor to kill his patient because he didn't know what else to do with them."

In 1949, the Black-owned Carolinian newspaper called out the death penalty's "trappings and pious and refined cruelties."

Around the same time people stopped tinkering with death machinery, even southern states stopped executing people. NC: executions, 1961-1984. TN, 1960-2000. Not executing has always been on the table. It's not a recent fantasy. Until the 1960s, it was political but not partisan.

The backlash against the Civil Rights Movement allowed (white) Americans to imagine the death penalty as a punishment for 1960s "lawlessness." Running against Black Dem Harvey Gantt in 1990, Jesse Helms supports death for "DRUG DEALERS AND BRUTAL MURDERERS." A cynical wedge.

Today, we're doing what politicians did 100 years ago: seeking out secretive and invisible methods of killing people. Secret meetings in parking lots. Writing personal checks for execution drugs. But today the goal is not to lessen pain but to inflict it.

arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/…

Thomas Jefferson wished execution to "be the last melancholy resource against those whose existence is become inconsistent with the safety of their fellow citizens." Today, the death penalty marks governments whose operation is inconsistent with the safety of their citizens.