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Thread: History of Capital Punishment in Maine

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    History of Capital Punishment in Maine

    Capital punishment in Maine

    Between 1644 and 1885 21 people were executed in Maine. 10 of these executions were carried out before statehood (gained on March 15, 1820), and 11 after. Hanging was the only method of executions.

    All but two executed people were males. The first person executed in Maine, sometime in 1644, was Mrs. Cornish. Also, 23-year old Native American Patience Sampson. She was hanged on July 31, 1735.

    16 of executed were white, 2 Native Americans and 3 African Americans.

    All but one carried out death sentences were imposed for murder. Only Jeremiah Baum (executed sometime in 1780) was put to death for treason.

    39-year old escaped convict Daniel Wilkinson was the last person executed in Maine. He was hanged on November 21, 1885.

    The death penalty in Maine was officially abolished in 1887—just two years after Wilkinson's execution. Wilkinson slowly died of strangulation from a poorly tied hangman's noose, which was used as a reason by abolitionists to argue that the death penalty was inhumane.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital...hment_in_Maine

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    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    The 1st prisoner executed by Maine’s state government murdered his own son

    Seth Elliot of Knox killed his youngest son, slitting the 2-year-old’s throat with a 25-cent razor, on July 25, 1824.

    That grim fact was clear and undisputed at his murder trial in October that year.

    The real question before the empanelled jury, the one on which Elliot’s life hung, was whether he was insane when he did it, or merely drunk. Genuine madness was a viable defense against the hangman’s noose, rum was not.

    Defense attorneys argued he drank, yes, but only because of his mental illness. Maine’s 1st attorney general maintained Elliot only seemed insane because he was drunk.

    In the end, the jury sided with the state and the convicted child killer became the 1st person executed by the new state government. Maine had joined the union just 5 years earlier. All told, Elliot was the 18th person put to death by any government on Maine ground.

    Elliot was a prosperous farmer with 7 children and a wife. History has forgotten her 1st name. He owned more than 300 acres of land, with 3 barns, sheep, hayfields and a woodlot.

    The Elliot family lived in a large brick house with hired farm hands and domestic help.

    To all outward appearances, Elliot, 36, was doing well for himself. In reality, he was a very unhappy man in the months leading up to his son’s death.

    Frequently drunk or hungover, he neglected his work in the fields, wrote incoherent, rambling letters to friends and was cruel to his family.

    According to court transcripts, kept in the Harvard University Law School library, Benjamin Sanborn, a farmhand living with the family that summer, swore Elliot would get drunk, then terrorize his family by night, chasing them from room to room and locking his wife outside.

    On at least one occasion, he threatened to shoot her.

    “[He was] arbitrary and cross when he was drinking,” Sanborn said. “I found him with a loaded gun in his hands.”

    At trial, many others testified to Elliot’s hard-drinking ways. Almost every witness claimed to have seen him drunk at least once.

    “His passions are quick and he makes great use of ardent spirits,” said Samuel Farnum, another farmhand.

    He said he thought his employer was drunk the day he killed his son, too.

    “By his looks, talk and breath,” Farnum said.

    Trial witnesses also testified to Elliot’s habit of telling anyone who would listen that his youngest son — John — was not his own. Elliot was convinced, for no reason anyone could understand, that his wife had been unfaithful and the family baby was the fruit of some secret tryst.

    When asked what other things Elliot would say about his own wife, more than 1 person on the stand declined to elaborate, for sake of decorum.

    “It was too indecent to be related at this time,” said a neighbor, Samuel Waters.

    At the trial in Castine, which lasted all of October 29, 1824, Elliot’s defense attorney’s did little to dispute their client’s bad behavior or taste for alcohol. Instead, they claimed both were evidence of declining mental health — and had a novel theory as to why Elliot later seemed coherent.

    On the Sunday morning he killed his son, Elliot laid down on a bed in a room off the kitchen with his toddler, slashed the boy’s throat, then his own.

    The boy died from the four inch gash, which severed his carotid artery and laid open his windpipe. Elliot’s own wound was not as severe. He survived.

    But defense attorneys produced an old fashioned — even for that day — doctor who said bloodletting was an acceptable treatment for insanity. Therefore, it was plausible to believe Elliot was insane when he killed his son but was then cured by blood loss from his own serious, self-inflicted wound.

    Maine’s first attorney general, Erastus Foote, who argued the case himself, refuted the claim, bringing a younger, more current physician named Hollis Monroe of Belfast to the stand.

    “Do you know any time when bleeding would have been good for the prisoner?” Foote asked the doctor.

    “I do not,” Monroe said.

    Foote also entered into evidence several long passages from up-to-date textbooks, borrowed from a medical school in Brunswick, none of which recommended bleeding as a treatment for insanity.

    Curiously, Foote also produced witnesses testifying that Elliot told them his wife had murdered the boy and attempted to kill him, as well — that she’d framed him. Elliot’s attorneys, however, did not seize on that line of defense, at all, sticking with the insanity strategy.

    (source: Bangor Daily News)
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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