Hanging in the United States
[1] Four years later, the Supreme Court overturned its previous ruling, and in 1976, capital punishment was again legalized in the United States.
[2] Currently, only New Hampshire has a law specifying hanging as an available secondary method of execution, now only applicable to one person, who was sentenced to capital punishment by the state prior to its repeal in 2019.
[6][page needed] During the Salem witch trials of the early 1690s, most of the men and women convicted of witchcraft were sentenced to public hanging.
During this time period, hanging was not considered to be cruel and unusual, yet almost two hundred years later, this amendment was key to the temporary suspension of capital punishment by the Supreme Court.
Today, the eighth amendment is still an essential argument employed by those in favor of abolishing capital punishment.
During this time of political unrest, some prominent members of society believed that capital punishment such as hanging ought to be abolished.
"[8] Individuals like Benjamin Rush laid the foundation for death penalty abolition movements that are still carried on today.
Most of the southern states in addition to Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island actually raised their number of capital offenses.
"[11][page needed] By 1835, five states – Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts – had enacted laws providing for private hangings.
In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln sanctioned the hanging of 39 Sioux Indians convicted of murdering white settlers in Mankato, Minnesota.
Mary Surratt, one of the four, was the first woman to receive capital punishment by the United States federal government.
[13] After the American Civil War, the frontier opened up, and law lagged behind, with an undetermined number of local criminals suffering Lynching, or extrajudicial hanging.
Bailey was just the third criminal to be hanged since 1965,[18] the other two being Charles Rodman Campbell in 1994 and Westley Allan Dodd in 1993, both in Washington State.
