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CNN Sunday Morning

A Brief History of U.S. Executions

Aired June 10, 2001 - 09:54   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Tim McVeigh has been moved to the holding cell at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. It's just a few feet from where he'll be executed. McVeigh goes to his death tomorrow morning without apology at this point for the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

CNN's Garrick Utley has some historical perspective on capital punishment in this country.

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GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Nothing, it has been said, concentrates the mind like the immanence of a hanging or the four hangings of the conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That spectacle in 1865 commanded the public's attention, as with other executions.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In the little courtroom in Flemington, New Jersey, the trial of trials was staged while all the world watched.

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UTLEY: Watched in 1936 as Bruno Hauptmann was tried for the murder of a child of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann denied his guilt but...

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Richard Bruno Hauptmann sentenced to the electric chair.

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UTLEY: Hauptmann continued to protest his sentence from Death Row.

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RICHARD BRUNO HAUPTMANN: I shall go to death as an innocent man.

(END VIDEO CLIP) UTLEY: And on the night of Hauptmann's electrocution, radio commentators outside the prison walls broadcast live to a nation that was following the drama to it's final moment.

(on camera): Most executions, though, pass with little notice. But those crimes that touch a nerve hold our attention to the very end for a simple reason, the public fascination for the punishment, like the crime, is about life and the taking of life.

(voice-over): Although Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had never killed anyone, when they were sentenced to death in 1951 for passing American nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union. They were seen as traitors. Their executions, he first, she second, in New York's Sing Sing Prison, once again drew reporters to the prison gate to rush the news to the nation.

Executions can work their way into the popular culture. Bruce Springstein's "Nebraska" told the story of Charlie Starkweather, who was executed in Nebraska in 1958 for a killing spree which took 11 lives.

Sometimes interest in an execution is less about the crime than the claims of the condemned. Caryl Chessman spent 12 years on California's death row, where he wrote four books. Chessman claimed had was a changed person from the one who had been sentenced to death. Letters poured into the governor's office calling for Chessman's life to be saved -- it wasn't. Nor was Karla Faye Tucker's life spared in 1998 when she went on prime time television to say that she, too, was a changed person.

(on camera): For all of the attention paid to some executions, there has been little public appetite to show them to the nation. People seem content to keep them out of sight, if not out of mind. Although there is the story of Ruth Snyder.

(voice-over): In 1927 in a New York court, she was sentenced to death for the murder of her husband. Among the reporters allowed to witness her execution was one who had taped a camera to the bottom of his leg. He raised his pants cuff and took this picture, which appeared on the cover of "The New York Daily News." The tabloid that day printed and sold an extra 750,000 copies.

Garrick Utley, CNN, New York.

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