The Last Mile

Inside the Sing Sing Death House

Will Nixon

Death Penalty in New York State...
Sing Sing made the electric chair famous. The executions concluded great public melodramas. Reporters from newspapers, pulp magazines, radio, and newsreels flocked to sensational cases such as the “Lonely Hearts Killers” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which featured a nurse and a former British spy who met through “a pen-pal club for the lovelorn” and “teamed up to swindle and murder at least three lonely women,” writes Scott Christianson in a remarkable new book, Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House (New York University Press, 184 pp., $24.95 cloth). From such stories, Hollywood made more than a dozen movies about the Ossining, Westchester County prison “that imprinted chilling images of the chair, the last mile, and other macabre conventions onto the minds of generations of Americans.”
No doubt, the public wanted capital punishment to be the conclusion of a grand morality play in which the hand of justice finally catches up with the evil wrongdoer, who repents at the end. But real executions, like real life, rarely played out on such exalted planes. Presented almost as a scrapbook of old photographs and documents from Sing Sing files, Condemned offers vivid glimpses into the lives and the institution shaped by the death penalty. An exhibit of pictures and materials that expands upon the book is now on display at Time & Space Limited Warehouse in Hudson until the end of June.
Although Christianson himself opposes the death penalty, he imposes no judgments on the documents in the book. “I’m certainly capable of producing a polemic,” he said in a May interview with Chronogram. “But I felt that these materials, without glorifying or demonizing anybody, made us aware that these were all human beings.”
From 1891 to 1963, the deadly chair, redesigned at one point by an engineer from General Electric, executed 606 men and 8 women, few of whom actually provided the tabloid glamour in their lives or crimes that made Sing Sing famous. The typical condemned prisoner was a buttonhole maker, laundry worker, bartender, laborer, or transient, who had shot someone in a robbery, or driven over his sister-in-law with a car. Although their file documents record this brutality, they also reveal them as people with modest needs and wishes that seem almost pathetic and yet heartbreaking to us now.
For his last supper, one inmate requested lobster, ice cream, chocolate candies, four cigars and two Pepsis. For his final letter, another inmate actually sent his rosary beads to the prosecutor responsible for his death sentence. He included a detailed description of how to make these beads from hardened bread and then stain them red with “cherry cool aid concentrate.” Perhaps this prisoner, a plasterer executed for shooting a man in a bar, knew no one else to write to.
The most riveting documents are the mug shots. Who can resist staring at the face of a man on the doorstep of death? Wouldn’t we like to believe that these people achieve a certain wisdom about life at the end? But these mug shots remain too ambiguous for an easy interpretation. Typically, the men still wear coats and ties from the courtrooms where they learned their sentence earlier in the day. “Nearly all carry somber, sullen, or resigned expressions before an indifferent lens,” Christianson writes. “Some seem defiant, some bewildered, but most appear struck by an awful realization.” But I’m not so sure. Only a handful of men in the mug shots look troubled or distraught. Most look solemn, but perhaps no more solemn than many other people have appeared in other identification photographs, such as driver’s licenses or passports. Unlike Christianson, the mug shots make me wonder if most people really can prepare for an early death. Maybe the human life force refuses to accept it until the end.
After winning a court appeal, one man released from the Death House wrote the sort of letter to the warden that you would send to a hotel after a vacation: “The Officers and Guards are as fine a group of men as you could find anywhere,” he wrote. “‘Dick’ and ‘Freddie’ go about their duties as if they had a part interest in the place, always helpful and ready with a word of cheer if needed. I enjoyed ‘Terry’s’ homelike meals...I extend my best wishes to all. But I hope I never come back.” But this man was reconvicted and executed in 1952 for shooting a stranger on Main Street in Kingston with a rifle in broad daylight.
For many years, America’s most famous opponent of the death penalty was, ironically, the warden of Sing Sing himself, Lewis Lawes. “At present there are 18 men and two women in the Death House awaiting the fateful day,” he wrote in a popular book in 1933. “If they signified that only ten or twenty murders were committed each year in New York State, then one could say correctly perhaps, that the death penalty in capital cases was effective and accomplished its purpose. But actually far less than one-percent of those who commit murder are executed.”
Still, Lawes oversaw 303 executions during his tenure from 1920 to 1941. “He was a major prison reformer. He had the courage to speak out against policies he thought were wrong, something I wish we saw more of today,” Christianson said. “But he also believed in carrying out the law.” Not until the civil rights movement compelled the courts to pay attention to the rights of the accused did the death penalty draw to an end in 1963 in New York State. By then, the appeals process took so long, and so many condemned prisoners won commutations of their death sentences that the state finally transformed the Death House into a visitors’ center and shipped the electric chair to a Virginia museum.
New York State has never admitted to executing an innocent person. Yet past practices, including coerced confessions, all-white juries, and other violations of fairness and justice, suggest that many people sent to the electric chair decades ago would not be condemned to die today. While blacks have always been disproportionately represented on death row, Christianson added that the system has targeted other ethnic groups in the past as well, including Italians and Jews. From his research, he also learned that a handful of judges imposed most of the death penalties, even though many others handled more murder cases. “I call them the serial killer judges,” he says. Even during the heyday of capital punishment one third of the condemned prisoners won commuted sentences on appeal.
But the death penalty is back. In 1995, New York reinstated the practice, this time to be performed by poison injection at Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border. Five men now wait on the new death row, although they may not be executed anytime soon. Conservative politicians, rather than criminologists, have revived the death penalty to appeal to many voters who yearn for simple and draconian punishments in our morally chaotic society. Presidential contender George W. Bush certainly seems enthusiastic about it. During his governorship, Texas has executed 135 people, while commuting the sentence of just one. But, surprisingly, Christianson sounds optimistic. With so many police corruption stories in the news, public doubt grows about the fairness of the criminal justice system. Since 1976, some 87 innocent people have been released from death row around the country. Even some conservatives like Pat Robertson and George Will now oppose this flawed but fatal punishment. “This is one of the few issues where society is going in a more progressive direction,” Christianson says. “I believe we’ll achieve another moratorium on the death penalty.”
“Condemned: A Documentary Odyssey Through New York’s Sing Sing Death House,” an exhibition of official photographs and other artifacts from formerly secret prison files kept in the New York State Archives, curated by Scott Christianson, will be on view until June 30 at TSL Warehouse, 434 Columbia St., Hudson. For more information call 518-822-8448.
To order a copy of Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House contact New York University Press at 800-996-NYUP or email orders@nyupress.nyu.edu.