Posted by Carolyn Ramsey (guest-blogging):
Why the Wild West Hanged Fewer Intimate Murderers:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_11_12-2006_11_18.shtml#1163657358
My data supports the conclusion that late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century intimate homicide cases in New York and Colorado
produced remarkably similar results: �In both states, men who killed
intimates risked a murder conviction, while female defendants tended
to be acquitted or found guilty of lesser crimes by juries sympathetic
to their stories of physical or emotional abuse.� However, New York
and Colorado did not take the same approach to punishing male
prisoners who had been convicted of intimate murder. The cultural and
legal reasons for this divergence are worth exploring. To share my
thoughts on the subject, I�ve posted another excerpt from my article,
�Intimate Homicide: Gender and Crime Control, 1880-1920,� 77 Univ.
Colo. L. Rev. 101 (2006):
. . . New York and Colorado differed dramatically in social and
cultural terms in the late nineteenth century, and those
differences produced divergent sentencing patterns. Whereas New
York sentenced a relatively large number of intimate killers to
death as a percentage of its total executions, Colorado did not.
Instead, men who killed their paramours, spouses, and relatives in
this western state most often received life sentences.
[My] article suggests that the disparity in execution rates for
intimate murder in the two states owed much to the slow westward
spread of norms of civilized masculinity and distaste for capital
punishment. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth, Colorado�s eagerness to shed its frontier image
helped fuel revulsion toward male defendants who killed their
wives, lovers, or other family members. Hence, Colorado juries did
not hesitate to convict men of intimate murder. But ideals of male
civility were newer and less deeply rooted in this western state
than in the northeast. Moreover, by the time Colorado experienced a
surge of opposition to the death penalty, New Yorkers once again
embraced it with fervor. Thus, in contrast to their east-coast
counterparts, Coloradoans proved reluctant to use state-sponsored
execution -- a form of punishment they increasingly questioned --
to exact retribution and deterrence in intimate homicide cases.
Plagued by adult crime, juvenile gangs, and inadequate law
enforcement, Denver was a rough and dirty city in the late
nineteenth century . . . One might expect that, in this setting,
the state would have ordered men convicted of killing their wives,
girlfriends, or relatives to swing from the gallows. Yet [between
1880 and 1920] not a single Denver prisoner was legally hanged for
intimate homicide, although the state executed eleven people
convicted of crimes in the city. Indeed, in the entire state of
Colorado, only about eleven percent of all legal executions (four
of thirty-seven) involved defendants found guilty of intimate
killings. All men, save one, who were convicted of first-degree
murder in Denver for killing their lovers, wives, or relatives
received life sentences, many of which were commuted to shorter
prison terms.
By contrast, New York executed at least seventy-six intimate
murderers between 1880 and 1920 -- about twenty-five percent of its
total executions. And capital punishment in New York County during
the same period claimed ninety-one prisoners, more than one-third
of whom had killed their paramours, spouses, or other family
members . . .
What accounts for the disparity between the New York and Colorado
execution rates in intimate murder cases? The most legalistic
answer simply looks to the statutes: First-degree murder carried a
mandatory death sentence in New York, whereas in Colorado, for most
of the period encompassed by [my research], it did not. However,
going beyond the statutory explanation, it is possible to identify
significant cultural differences between the two states.
As a general matter, the west lagged behind the east in the
reception of social and cultural change. The separate spheres
ideology -- which accorded women the duty of keeping house and
inculcating the next generation with religious values, while their
husbands sallied forth into the business sphere -- remained
impracticable on the frontier through the mid-nineteenth century.
Pioneer women had to perform a wide range of tasks including
physical labor, in order for the family to survive. Although
participation in breadwinning may have given frontier wives greater
strength, the lack of distinct sex roles was paired with the
survival of patriarchal norms that tacitly encouraged men�s use of
violence to obtain female submission.
. . . The lack of established structures in the west also gave
patriarchy lingering power and legitimacy that it lacked in the
northeast. While public law enforcement developed later in New York
than is often assumed, western legal institutions were even more ad
hoc . . . There was no penitentiary in the Colorado territory until
1871, and as late as 1878, Denver had only one police officer for
every 4,166 citizens, compared to New York City�s ratio of one
patrolman for every 400 citizens . . . In the absence of a
sufficiently large and well-trained police force, the authority of
the male household head over his family retained political as well
as social importance.
Anti-capital punishment agitation also followed a different
chronology in Colorado than it did in New York . . . Colorado
death-penalty opponents increased in strength and numbers in the
1890s, after New Yorkers had largely abandoned their agitation.
. . . Coloradoans� opposition to the death penalty in the late
1800s, combined with the relative youth of social values condemning
extreme violence toward frontier women, may account for the fact
that the public response to men who killed their intimates was not
quite as harsh in Colorado as it was on the east cost. In the late
nineteenth century, several eastern states [including New York,
considered using] the whipping post to deter wife-beating. The
campaign for the corporal punishment of wife-beaters embodied many
aspects of the [tough, Wild West image that Theodore Roosevelt and
other east-coasters sought to convey at the turn of the century as
an antidote to Victorianism�s staid respectability]. It represented
a new muscular form of masculinity in which men who failed to
protect their women were [to be] beaten, not merely jailed or
censured.
. . . Although the whipping post campaign had a few adherents in
the western United States, the state of Colorado did not
participate as a matter of official law or policy . . . Colorado�s
reluctance to use either the whip or the gallows to control
intimate violence may have stemmed from its insecure position as a
patriarchal, frontier society that sought to earn a more polished
reputation [by building theatres, museums, libraries, and churches;
expressing disapproval of lynching; and hiding state-sponsored
capital punishment behind the walls of the penitentiary]. Until
1870, the state struggled with a gender imbalance that left women
outnumbered six to one in Denver . . . When more women started to
arrive, Denver faced the delicate task of convincing them that they
were coming to a religious, female-friendly community where it
would be safe and comfortable to reside. With regard to intimate
murders, which occurred despite the civilizing ethos urged by the
church and the municipal government, legal authorities weighed two
options: they could bow to anti-death penalty forces (thus risking
the appearance of being soft on intimate murder), or they could
hang the culprits (potentially turning the spotlight on the city�s
gendered tensions and dangers). They chose the former. . .
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