Hutzell: Maryland’s love of public executions once was as bloodthirsty as Pete Hegseth’s

Between the vinegary mutton barbecue and the neck-straining airshow, my father-in-law shocked me.

We were in Owensboro, Kentucky, for an old-home birthday tour, visiting the farmhouse where he grew up nine decades ago, the schools he attended and the friends who still survive.

Sitting on a balcony as fighter jets and stunt biplanes filled the broad Ohio River sky, my wife’s dad told me about the execution.

As a child in 1936, his father took him to see 22-year-old Rainey Bethea hanged by the neck until dead for rape and murder. It was the last public execution in America, and as many as 20,000 people crowded in to watch.

“And then, there were the house-parties,” The New York Times reported. “Hospitable Owensboro folk entertained visitors from out of town.”

Thankfully, we’ve been spared the ignominy of renewing this barbarity.

President Donald Trump said Thursday the idea of livestreaming mass murderer Nidal Hasan’s death in December was too much. Even a president who sees no boundaries recognized this one.

“I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die...” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.

Thank you, President Trump.

He reversed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s unhinged decision to make Hasan’s execution public. Public outrage close to the election probably played a role.

It certainly wasn’t sympathy for Hasan. On Nov. 5, 2009, the then-Army psychiatrist shot 13 soldiers to death and wounded 32 others waiting in lines for medical clearance before deployment to Afghanistan.

I don’t know how you feel about the death penalty (I don’t support it), but Maryland abolished it in 2013.

Hold the self-congratulations. We were once as bloodthirsty as Hegseth.

A century ago, we crowded around gallows to see the spectacle of a man — it was almost always men and almost always Black men — drop through a trapdoor with a noose around his neck.

Baltimore. Annapolis. Snow Hill. Towson. The state’s biggest city and every county seat had an executioner, usually the elected sheriff, who carried out the verdict of a judge and jury in front of eager crowds.

“When the trap was sprung at 7:15 this morning, snuffing out the life of Samuel Smith, between two thousand and three thousand white persons were massed behind the Baltimore County Jail at Towson trying to see the execution,” The AFRO-American wrote on Feb. 24, 1922.

Journalists of the day recorded men and women vying for the best spot, tearing down a fence the sheriff’s office erected to see the death of a Black man convicted of robbing and shooting a white woman.

The call to end this started gaining momentum in 1915, after an even bigger, more boisterous crowd overwhelmed the tiny Eastern Shore town of Snow Hill to see Italian immigrant Frank Grano hanged in an open field for murdering three people.

Even those who called for change resisted condemning those who turned out, focusing on state officials who hesitated to end the spectacle.

“There can be little opposition to such a change, for even many of those who have seen one hanging are the most strongly opposed to seeing another and are advocates of private executions,” columnist Francis F. Beirne wrote for The Evening Sun the day after Grano was hanged.

Oh, but there was.

Some argued public hangings were a deterrent to crime, a check on secret government executions or, worse, incompetent ones. These crimes happened in communities, and opponents of reform argued those communities had a right to see the consequences.

So hangings continued. Sheriffs began keeping the hour of execution secret, built more fences and even, to prevent a repeat of the crowd that surrounded Grano, carried out a condemned man’s sentence on a remote Worcester County island.

As a journalist, I find these accounts remind us we are a product of our times. Reporters always described the condemned as composed, with final words that rang false.

“So long boys!”

“Well, it’s time for me to go.”

For Black men of the era, arrest was often tantamount to conviction, and execution if the victim was a white woman.

Some confessed under who-knows-what circumstances. Others maintained their innocence until death. Trials were always short and before an all-white jury of men. All of their convictions are suspect today.

Attitudes changed gradually, just not for the reasons modern sensibilities might hope.

After a white mob in Annapolis broke into the Anne Arundel County jail and lynched Henry Davis, accused of attacking a woman shopkeeper, sheriffs placed machine guns to keep executions from going awry.

And still hangings continued — three within five months in Annapolis, two on the same day in Baltimore. From Hagerstown to Rockville, Ellicott City to Princess Anne, crowds came by the dozen and the thousand.

It was so commonplace that Anne Arundel County haggled over the $90 invoice for building a new gallows, refusing to pay more than $60. It then rented it to Baltimore County for a hanging in Towson.

Finally, the General Assembly voted in 1922 to move all executions to the state prison in Baltimore starting the following year. Opponents found one final argument against it, saying a permanent gallows would send the wrong message to prisoners not sentenced to die.

“This should end once and for all,” The Baltimore Sun wrote, calling on Gov. Albert Ritchie to sign the legislation. “We cannot afford to pander any longer to this element of hideous brutality.”

At least three more public hangings followed before the law took effect. It would be 90 years before Maryland outlawed the death penalty in 2013.

My father-in-law, now in frail health, waived his blue Air Force veteran cap as the Thunderbirds flew in death-defying formations over the Ohio River.

They don’t speak of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, at least not to me. They’re no different than we are in Maryland, only a few generations removed from the hideous brutality and looking away in horror.

And that — as Hegseth showed us — is not so far at all.