I wrote my award-winning A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon (2001) during my last semester of law school, Fall 1999. As I tell in 52 and Strangely Found, I wanted to write a book during law school, and once I began to do research on the Oregon death penalty, I saw that its history had never been written. The three parts of the book are History; Procedure; and Law. I state the thesis in the Introduction: "The central premise of this work, unfolded throughout, is that the toll exacted on Oregonians in the last 17 years by the modern death penalty statute enacted in 1984 has far exceeded any benefits that its most zealous supporters can claim it has provided. This has occurred, in my judgment, not because the death penalty is inherently immoral or becuase it has been applied in a racially discriminatory way in Oregon, but because of the huge cost of unforeseen and unexpected consequences after the 1984 law was passed."

The following is an excerpt from the first part of the book, where I try to capture the spirit of one of the last public exections in Oregon, on January 31, 1902.

A Tortured History (Eugene, OR: Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, 2001), pp. 25-26.

"Execution was set for 8 a.m. on Friday, January 31, 1902 [outside of the Multnomah County Courthouse at Fifth and Salmon in downtown Portland]. Already by 6 o'clock crowds were gathering outside the enclosure. Tickets had been issued to 400 special guests, and they were let inside after the sheriff and his companions from other counties had prepared the entrances, one on Fifth and one on Salmon. It was a male-only affair since, according to the beliefs of the time, the delicacy of the female frame and mind would probably be overwhelmed by the event. Observant onlookers, however, could not help noticing a crowd of eager females perched on the roof of a hotel across Fifth Avenue, straining for the most advantageous view of the proceedings.

"The atmosphere at the hanging was part carnival and part martyrdom. The carnival part would be evident even to a casual viewer: people clutching rare tickets to the event, someone trying to bribe a guard to let him in, the crowd pressing forward to see the events, seven linemen from the telephone company clambering up nearby phone poles to get an unobstructed view, greetings exchanged among the crowd, all nervously expecting great and unusual things.

"But there were also unmistakable signs that a martyrdom of sorts was afoot. There was a detailed account of how the prisoners had spent their last night, their hearty breakfasts, the earnest attempts of the missionaries to offer consolation, and the lusty singing of classic Gospel hymns by the condemned men around 7 o'clock. The reverie of the moment was unceremoniously broken by the sheriff's reading of the death warrant. Then the prisoners were escorted to the platform for their final test of faith. One, Dalton, desired to address the crowd. A great hush fell as listeners and reporters strained for his every word, oblivious to the irony that a man to whom no none had listened for the balance of his life would be vouchsafed divine wisdom to shed on the crowd in his last moment.

"Dalton exhorted the crowd to trust in Jesus and not to follow on the path that he had chosen. In a description that could have been lifted from an early Christian martyrology, one reporter had it:

'(t)he condemned man spoke up with an earnest appeal to young men to lead better lives and accept Christianity. His voice was clear and hardly a tremor was noticeable. He gestured freely and raised his eyes to Heaven in an attitude of absolute faith with his Maker. he read from the Bible Psalm 23.'

"The scene was replete with other indicia of verisimilitude: the leaden gray sky, a light rain that began to fall during the proceedings, the snow underfoot, the condemned men waving to acquaintances in the crowd, a prisoner nervously testing the tensility of the rope, the reporters faithfully narrating the exact moment that the traps were sprung (7:57 or 7:58, depending on the account), the exact distance that each man plunged to his death (Dalton fell 5'6" while Wade fell 6'2"), the precise facial expression of each man after the hoods were removed, the scramble of some members of the crowd for souvenirs of the event. The souvenirs were perhaps a piece of rope or a sliver of the platform, gathered up to show the children, wife and grandchildren, to be sure, but also, in keeping with theme of martyrdom, as if these mementos were relics of one who had passed through his final test of faith to be with God."

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