James Acker, a distinguished teaching professor at the School of Criminal Justice, and Brian Keough, head of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, are among the founders of the University’s National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA). The NDPA contains a repository of publicly-accessible materials that track the history of capital punishment in the United States. Acker and Keough join the series to share about the digitization efforts of a collection by M. Watt Espy, a researcher who spent three decades of his life gathering and indexing documentation of legal executions for what would become the nation’s largest database on capital punishment.
James Acker, a distinguished teaching professor at the School of Criminal Justice, and Brian Keough, head of the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, are among the founders of the University’s National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA).
The NDPA contains a repository of publicly-accessible materials that track the history of capital punishment in the United States.
Acker and Keough join the series to share about the digitization efforts of a collection by M. Watt Espy, a researcher who spent three decades of his life gathering and indexing documentation of legal executions for what would become the nation’s largest database on capital punishment.
The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives has since added 6,000 executions to the list through the verification process of Espy’s work.
Espy began the project in the 1970s as a traveling salesman pedaling encyclopedias and cemetery plots, among other goods. While the scholar was originally an advocate for capital punishment, he became an avid opponent following growing concerns about racial prejudice in the legal system.
During a pre-Internet era, Espy documented over 15,000 executions conducted between 1608 and 2002.
Espy died in 2009 at the age of 76.
The University at Albany Libraries was responsible for salvaging the “Espy File” from Espy’s home in Headland, A.L. following his passing and moving the database to its current home at the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives.
The NDPA is a partnership between the University at Albany Libraries and the Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) at the University’s School of Criminal Justice.
Learn more about the Espy Project.
Image from the "Espy File" collection: Mug shot of George Stinney, a 14-year-old who was convicted of murdering two white girls in Alcolu, S.C. He was executed by electric chair in 1944.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. I have with me Jim Acker, a distinguished teaching professor at the School of Criminal Justice and Brian Keough, head of the M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives at the University at Albany. Acker and Keogh are among the founders of the National Death Penalty Archive, a collection of archival materials that track the history of capital punishment in the US. Jim and Brian, thank you both for being here.
Jim Acker: Pleasure to join you.
Brian Keough: Thanks for having me.
Sarah O'Carroll:
So earlier this year, it sounds like there were upwards of 3,000 people under sentence of death in the United States. That's a pretty jarring number, but I'd like to ask if you can put this into context for us and help us understand the scope of capital punishment in our country as well as maybe how it varies by state.
Jim Acker:
Capital punishment has been a part of United States history even before the country was founded, if that's not a contradiction. It goes back to colonial days. The first recorded execution occurred in 1608 in colonial Virginia and since that time, upwards of in excess of 20,000 people had been executed. Recently, we've seen a significant downturn with respect to death sentences and execution. So at present, 29 States, the federal government and the United States military authorize capital punishment. There are about 2,400 people awaiting execution on death rows around the country. But as they say, in the past two decades, there's been a market decline in new death sentences as well as executions and a softening of public opinion with respect to the death penalty.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And do you feel that that is because of public opinion largely and that has infiltrated into the legal system? Or what other factors might contribute to this decline?
Jim Acker:
That is a question that many people are seeking definitive answers for, but it's rather apparent that several factors in combination are accounting for the diminution of interest and enthusiasm for the death penalty. The crime rate has been declining, meaning it's much less of a political issue. And in large part, capital punishment is a political issue as much as one that's focused on law or criminal justice. But beginning with the DNA era, the demonstrated reality, that in fact innocent people sometimes are convicted of crimes, and the fact that many people who've been convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death, were innocent. At last count, within the past, since the mid-seventies, something like 166 people were convicted of murder, spent years on death row and then their innocence was documented by DNA or other means.
Jim Acker:
And there's no doubt that the concern about innocence is responsible in part for the decline in public opinion. But there are other factors. Life without parole is a relatively recent introduction to the world of criminal justice, again mostly occurring in the 90s and thereafter. And it is now seen as a very realistic alternative in terms of retributive justice incapacitation. And there's much better lawyering these days from the defense perspective than there was once upon a time. So many factors help account for the decline and support for the death penalty.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And are there any states in particular that seem to be leading efforts either in favor or against capital punishment that sort of rise above the others?
Jim Acker:
If you were to look at a map of the United States for death penalty and non-death penalty jurisdictions, you'd find that the 21 States that don't presently authorize the death penalty are clumped here in the Northeast. New Hampshire is the most recent state to abolish the death penalty. They just did so a few months ago. And that rounded out the block in the Northeast that does not have capital punishment.
Jim Acker:
There's also another group in the Midwest: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and, others that have abandoned the death penalty. In Alaska, Hawaii, and then a couple of oddballs like West Virginia and New Mexico. But, but historically and today the death penalty has predominantly, not exclusively by any means, but in large measure been a Southern phenomenon. And if you ask anybody, where the death penalty capital in the United States is, anybody will correctly respond Texas, because Texas is far [inaudible 00:05:29] the leader in carrying out executions.
Jim Acker:
We normally mark the beginning of the so called modern era of capital punishment in the mid seventies. And since the mid seventies, Texas has executed more than five times as many people as any other state. That Texas has executed something like 560 or more individuals. And the next state on the list is Oklahoma or Virginia with about 110. So largely the South and largely Texas.
Sarah O'Carroll:
So that brings us to the archive. And Brian, this might be more of a question for you. I want to ask a little bit about how the archive got started and what the vision was for this collection of material.
Brian Keough:
Well, one of the things historians do is when they find a topic that they want to research and investigate, they look to see what's going on today. So Jim just gave us a great description of where capital punishment is today. So one of the things we did in partnership with the School of Criminal Justice here in the late nineties is we formed the National Death Penalty Archive. And with the help of professors in the school, we look to contact the leading spokespeople, leading organizations that were either advocating for or against capital punishment. So we collect their organizational records, their personal papers. And these primary sources, these unpublished materials, are the evidence that historians used to write about the past. So since 2000 we have close to 40 collections of organizational records such as the records of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and also personal papers like the papers of M. Watt Espy, one of the leading historians of the death penalty.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Hmm. And so when you say primary sources, it might be court records and newspaper articles, that sort of thing? What else? What else might someone find?
Brian Keough:
Even beyond those. Those things are publicly available. Usually we're looking at things like how organizations make decisions, so minutes of meetings or memos. Before email, people used to actually write memos on paper and communicate their ideas, their strategies, their viewpoints through these kinds of documents. Things like organizational newsletters or journals or unpublished essays. These things that don't find themselves into the regular library shelves, but are key to historians uncovering the past .
Sarah O'Carroll:
And, of course, making sense of what you're just looking at is an index card from a really long time ago. But if you can provide the other types of materials that can then contextualize why this is significant.
Brian Keough:
That's right. Yeah. And so in the case of Watt Espy, as I said, he was the one of the leading historians of executions and in the 1960s he began collecting source material in an effort to document every single legally sanctioned execution since the early 17th century.
Sarah O'Carroll: That's a big task.
Brian Keough:
A huge task. Right. And you know, it's never finished. It's like the painting of the Golden Gate Bridge, right? Once you finish it, you got to start over at the beginning again. Cause there's constantly, as Jim indicated, there's executions that are going on now. So what he did is collect newspaper articles, county histories, any records of executions, collected those, collated those and would type up an index card about each and every execution. And he identified close to 15,000 executions over a few decades of his work. Probably doubling what previous scholars had thought at that time.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And so he was really instrumental, it sounds like, in the collecting of these materials and the documentation. But did he also, was he also a scholar that tried to make some meaning out of this or was it mostly something that he presented to other scholars for them to analyze?
Brian Keough:
I think the latter, a little bit. I mean he did have his viewpoints and he did study and really get down into the details about some of these executions, but what happened in 1977 was the University of Alabama. He was based in Alabama, got interested in this and they started a coding project where they tried to take all of his source material and code things based on the crime, the date, all sorts of variables. And over time, by 1984 they received the National Science Foundation Grant and then in 1987 they published a dataset of about 11,000 executions and made it available in the ICPSR, which is the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. So you can go online and download this entire dataset.
Brian Keough:
But what we've been doing in the last decade or so is that as scholars really dive down into Espy's dataset. There were some errors that were identified. There were some under-reporting of executions in certain centuries there was over-reporting at other times. And so what we wanted to do was, okay, we're archivists, we want to make things available to people. Let's take all these index cards, let's take 120,000 pages of source material and scan it and make it available up on the web. So, that's what we did. We got a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources clear, and they gave us a two year grant. And so from 2017 to about six months ago, we digitized all of these pages. The grant allowed us to build a repository to make the material online. What we've gone back and done, additional material than the grant funded, was we're now going back for each and every execution and verifying whether it was right or not and trying to correct a lot of the errors.
Brian Keough:
And in that process we've identified probably an additional 6,000 individuals who were executed. The problem is the work is very slow. Espy may have identified an execution based on a source that said an execution was going to happen in three days, but there was no source to say it actually did happen. So we would consider that not verified. But even so, there's countless examples of where, for whatever reason, whether there is coding errors, where there was, at some point Espy became older, his work slowed down. A lot of his lists of people who were executed were not in the original dataset. So this is how we've identified approximately 6,000 additional people executed.
Jim Acker:
This continuation of Watt's work would make Watt Espy very happy. He was quite an individual. He was talking about a self educated historian. He actually began, well, he was a Navy veteran, then became a traveling salesman, peddling encyclopedias and cemetery plots among other things. And during the late fifties, sixties, and into the 70s, he became preoccupied with trying to document the history of executions, as Brian explained. And when he began his work, collectively it was estimated that about 7,000 people had been executed historically. And as Brian explained, Watt found double that. And when he stopped working, I think he had identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 18,000 executions. He lived in Headland, Alabama in a house where it was just packed with papers, photographs of people who'd been executed. And the records that he kept, he went courthouse to courthouse, town to town, in an era before computers.
Jim Acker:
And he didn't even photocopy a lot. He wrote down information on file cards and paper. And he kept all this in Headland, Alabama, where hurricanes strike from time to time. And because his collection was so valuable and it became known nationally and internationally, there was concern that we need to do something to preserve these and, and death penalty scholars, including a professor who was then at the University of Florida, Michael Radelet, and Professor Margaret Vandiver, the University of Memphis, encouraged Watt to think strongly about what to do with these records. And because we here at the University at Albany knew and worked with Professors Radelet and Vandiver and they kind of vouch for us. With their help and the help of Charles Lanier who was a co founder here at the University at Albany, of some of these death penalty works.
Jim Acker:
We went down to Alabama. We interviewed Watt Espy and then Charlie Lanier and Margaret and Mike Radelet packed up all these files and Charlie drove him up here, and put them in Brian's possession for the National Death Penalty Archive. And the work that Brian and colleagues are doing and digitizing them is making this invaluable one of a kind, a collection accessible to researchers, historians, people who are interested in the death penalty. So it's an ongoing project that is very important. Very, very important.
Sarah O'Carroll:
I was reading about the 1944 electrocution from the archive in South Carolina of George Stinney, Jr at age 14 as the youngest person. I wonder if it was stories like that that drove him to be interested in this and it seems like it had to have just defined his adult life to be working on this.
Jim Acker:
Watt Espy. I'd be the last person to try to understand what motivated him. There are various kinds of storytelling about what may have. One of the stories is that while he was a radio man in the Navy in the early 1950s, he received a wire about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And for some reason that sparked his interest. And then perhaps it was the selling of cemetery plots that took them a little bit closer to this era.
Jim Acker:
But, he's a classic kind of a southerner who had a deep drawl and that could tell stories that you wouldn't believe. And he actually started out as a proponent, a supporter of the death penalty. But the more he dug into the records and some of the individual cases and exposed the racial dimensions of capital punishment. Story after story about people who witnessed executions or even help carry them out as law enforcement officers would thereafter commit murder. And he would scratch his head and say, well, I don't think this is working as much of a deterrent if those who are watching people get executed go on and commit murder. So it's unclear what drove him but we're all quite thankful that he had this preoccupation.
Sarah O'Carroll:
I'm wondering if you have other projects that are going to be in the works. I know that this, you mentioned just how detailed and how slow the process can be from looking at all of this information, but is this something that you might want to do for other collections?
Brian Keough:
Well, right now we're focused on Espy because we want to, we have right now resources for 20 hours a week to dedicate it. It takes, you get through about four executions an hour, by the time you can verify or not verifying. So we have about four years at that level of funding. We are looking for additional possible funders for that. But mainly a lot of the things that we do now are, people who are activists in the 1970s and 1980s before the digital age really came around, have a lot of these papers and people's basements and attics. That's a lot of the, what the death bounty archive is doing is to make sure those resources are available for future scholars. But continuing to work on this dataset is a critical thing. Basically we're calling it Espy 2.0. This is going to be a completely new version of this dataset that scholars will be able to go and have more verification that the datasets are accurate.
Brian Keough:
I mean there's some of the data set has variables in it like occupation, race, which are problematic. And what do you say? How do you define executions is problematic. Military executions, Native American before Europeans came here, French territory, Spanish territory, English territory. So it's really, to say that there's a definitive database of all executions, I think, is a really noble goal. But I don't think it's always going to be in transition. And the other issue that we deal with with the death penalty archive is that people are working in the last 15 or 20 years. They don't use paper. Right? So saving born digital items is, we have to get in there sooner, cause formats change. Imagine if you opened a Microsoft word for file from 1998, right? Be all sorts of problems reading that.
Brian Keough:
So we try to work with political activists, political organizations to make sure we have methods. So they're preserving these, what we call born digital records that are never printed out. You could take paper and put it in a box for 50 years and open the box and most likely it'll still be there. But if you take floppy drives or CDs and put them in the box, you're going to have issues. So a lot of our work focuses in that area. But also trying to work with people, as Jim mentioned, the executions that have happened in the last two decades or so. And how can we get funding and resources to continue to document those executions
Sarah O'Carroll:
As we move more and more away from printed materials that I imagine looking at a really old newspaper clipping, or interview transcripts, or minutes from a meeting that would, there would be sort of a disassociation that you'd have to reeducate yourself about.
Brian Keough:
Yeah, I think definitely at some point a lot of things are just going to be all digital. I think one important change is when technology went from external medias, like floppy drives and CDs, to where we're at now with a cloud based storage system. That's a big, big sign of progress there. Cause most of those systems are backed up multiple times. So I think the archives field, the IT field, has come a long way in terms of recognizing that these are more difficult to save and developing protocols to do that. That's something that we do and that's part of this Espy project. It's also to learn how we can use digital tools. So our archivists, Greg Wiedeman and Melissa McMullen really have made substantial improvements in how we provide access to people.
Jim Acker:
Sarah, you mentioned a bit earlier, a 1944 execution of a 14 year old boy, George Stinney, Jr. in South Carolina. A young African American who was convicted of murdering two young white girls. It's one thing to have a statistic on something like this, but what's remarkable about the archive is the preservation of original newspaper reporting, which can be sensational as well as the photographic. The emotive impact of the cold statistics. And there's a gripping photograph of young George Stinney. A mugshot profile and looking straight at the camera that's prominently displayed in the archive. And it's that sort of value in addition to just the pure information that the archive can make available to people. And we encourage people to visit. The archive is something of a well known secret, a little known secret even on this campus. I bet you a very few people would know that on the third floor of the science library, there's this Grenander's special collection that houses the national death penalty archive. And it's open, accessible to the public. And it'd be great to see more people come in and take advantage of it.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Do you need to have an appointment? Or can you just walk in? I'm sure you'd need some help with trying to digest the information.
Brian Keough:
Yeah, I think we provide pretty detailed inventories of all the collections that we have. So typically scholars who do primary source research or even the general public, they know in advance to look at a website and see specifically among 15,000 boxes which three or four is pertinent to their research. So coming in, emailing us a day or two in advance is always great. But we have a lot of materials, probably a hundred selected items out on exhibit. So you can just come in and walk in and get in a nice representative sample of the different facets of the archive. You know we talk about Watt Espy collecting material on executions, but there are organizations out there of the victims, murder family victims. I think really fascinating aspect of a family member of yours is victim of a capital crime, yet you are still against capital punishment.
Brian Keough:
So we work with organizations like that. There's the whole interplay of the academic world and the political world and the role of religion in capital punishment. It's another big theme. Executing women, executing underage, like George Stinney, executing the mentally ill is a really a big theme in the history of capital punishment and it's still ongoing today. Right? As I mentioned earlier, issues today have a past and that's what historians really investigate. So there's so many facets of the death penalty and its history that it's sometimes hard to get a grasp on it. So massive.
Jim Acker:
And let me just reinforce something that Brian just alluded to that we're really hoping to capture the history of capital punishment. The National Death Penalty Archive is absolutely non ideological. That is, it's not an anti death penalty, it's not pro death penalty. It's trying to make the facts accessible so people can form their own judgment. And when Brian mentioned victims, that triggered this thought. We also in the archive have a collection from one of the leading supporters of the death penalty, academic name, Dr. Ernest van den Haag. And we have other academic records from people. David Baldus who studied racial disparities and capital punishment. Dr. William Bowers, who with others studied jury decision making in capital punishment. So it's designed to again get the full objective, as much as possible history of the multiple facets of capital punishment.
Brian Keough:
I even saw that there's a philosopher, Hugo Adam Bedau?
Jim Acker:
Bedau, right. Who actually was an abolitionist but yes, roamed in philosophical circles and inspired a lot of debate and thought about the death penalty from that perspective.
Brian Keough:
His papers are a wonderful collection cause he was active in the fifties sixties seventies really did a lot of the meat of his work. So his correspondence files with, boxes of them, are with people like Bill Bowers and Mike Radelet and they're discussing issues. They're discussing themes in their research. They're sharing ideas. They're agreeing. They're not agreeing. And it's all in these letters where they debate. And this is why these paper documents are very important to researchers. To get a grasp of what the issues are, what the debates are, and who are these people debating issues relating to a lot of the things that we've mentioned
Jim Acker:
And Hugo Bedau teamed up with Michael Radelet to examine 20th century, potentially capital cases, where people were erroneously convicted and they documented it. At least in their judgment, something like 350 individuals who were convicted of potentially capital crimes who didn't do it. And again, in their judgment, this is somewhat still debated, they found 23 people during the 20th century who were executed. Even though, in their judgment, they were factually innocent. And this is what history is all about.
Jim Acker:
What do you make of a finding like that? Is that an acceptable error rate? Is it totally unacceptable because even one innocent person executed is too much? Well, unless you have the facts to begin a discussion like this, it's terribly abstract. That's hopefully will help illuminate an informed opinion about the death penalty.
Sarah O'Carroll:
And something that I've also been struck by your comments has been just how interdisciplinary this is and that it could be into gender studies or political science. It's not just criminal justice itself, but there are so many other racial disparities that you mentioned that scholars from all sorts of backgrounds could be interested in.
Brian Keough:
Yeah, I think that's the goal. I mean you hit it right on the head there. I mean we want to reach out not just to criminal justice, to historians, but looking at all these different facets of how this criminal penalty is implemented. Whether there's innocence, whether there's issues that we can identify in the past so we can correct them today and going into the future. And that's really the goal of historians, right? To identify how we got someplace, how we got to where we're at. But making it interdisciplinary. Bringing in sociologists, bringing in, as you said, women's studies, African American studies, the specialists, to really tease out all sorts of issues. Cause it's fascinating. We could probably sit here all day and talk about things related to the importance of the Death Penalty Archive here at SUNY Albany.
Sarah O'Carroll: Well, Jim and Brian, thank you so much and thank you so much for sharing about the project and I hope that other people from campus and beyond will check out to the archives.
Jim Acker: Thank you. This has been a wonderful opportunity.
Brian Keough: Yes it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carrol. And that was Jim Acker and Brian Keough. You can let me know what you thought of the episode or who we should speak to next by emailing us. We're at mediarelations@albany.edu. Or you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.