Forcing the Executioners Hand: An Examination of the Prevalence and Role of “Legal Lynching”

• In Event: The Death Penalty as Social and Political Control

Abstract

Despite playing a central role in many scholars’ hypotheses about the relationship between lynchings and executions in the Jim Crow South, relatively little work has been done to quantitatively examine the prevalence of mob dominated trials and executions, or “legal lynchings”, during this period or how they influenced the relationship between lynching and capital punishment use during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this paper, I seek to address this gap by 1) documenting the prevalence of “legal lynchings” over time and across geographic contexts as well as 2) investigate whether and how “legal lynchings” may have impacted the use of lynching and capital punishment in the Jim Crow Era South. Using archival and historical execution data, I built a new event level dataset of mob dominated capital trials and executions between 1883 and 1924 in Texas counties and analyze this data with a series of event history models. The results of these analyses shed light on the connections between lynching and capital punishment as well the evolution of and transition between methods of social control more broadly.

Author

• Julia Teresa Thomas, University of Wisconsin-Madison