Deborah Denno comments to the Boston Globe on the 75th anniversary of Rainey Bethea’s hanging on Aug. 14, 1936, the last public execution in the United States.
By the time Bethea went to the gallows, most states had closed executions to the public and used the electric chair because hangings were “ghoulish events’’ said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University professor who studies the death penalty.
“There was a feeling that with the pain and botched hangings … it was inviting the worst in human behavior,’’ Denno said.
Read the entire Boston Globe story.