Appeared in Lane Nelson and Burk Foster, Death Watch: A Death Penalty Anthology, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001, pp. 188-207. Originally appeared in The Angolite, September/October 1996, pp. 36-47.

"These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual."

Justice Potter Stewart, Furman v. Georgia (1972)

For a brief time in the early 1970s, Ehrlich Anthony Coker was a one-man crime wave rolling across Georgia. On December 5, 1971, at age 21, he raped and stabbed to death a young woman. The next year he kidnapped, raped, beat and left for dead another young woman. For these crimes he received three life terms, two 20-year terms and one eight-year term. The prison sentences were imposed consecutively, and the people of Georgia probably breathed a sigh of relief that this violent young man had been permanently incapacitated.

When they thought of Coker put safely away, they should have kept in mind Lady Caroline Lamb's description of Lord Byron: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Within a year-and-a-half, Ehrlich Anthony Coker escaped from the Ware Correctional Institution outside Waycross, Georgia. He entered the home of Allen and Elnita Carver, tied up Allen, took his money and the keys to the family car. And he took a knife, with which he threatened Mrs. Carver, who at 16 had given birth three weeks before: "You know what's going to happen to you if you try anything, don't you."

Coker raped Mrs. Carver, stole the car and took her with him.

Police captured Coker before he did any further harm to Mrs. Carver. A Ware County jury convicted Coker of auto theft, armed robbery, kidnaping, escape and rape. They gave him a lot more prison time, and, undoubtedly fed up with his viciousness by this time, they gave him the death penalty for rape.

The jury found that Coker's crime contained two of the aggravating circumstances required for the imposition of the death sentence under Georgia law:

1. the offense was committed by a person with a prior capital felony conviction.

2. the offense was committed during the commission of another capital felony, armed robbery.

The court sentenced Coker to death by electrocution. His central argument on appeal was that the death penalty for rape was cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Race was not an issue, as it often was in other Georgia cases during this period: Coker was white, and his victims were also white. Appeals moved quickly through the state courts and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on March 28, 1977.

The Supreme Court announced its decision on June 29, 1977 (Coker v. Georgia, 97 S.Ct. 2861 [1977]). As usual in the critical death penalty decisions of the 1970s, the justices' opinions were sharply divided. Justices White, Stewart, Blackmun and Stevens "concluded that the sentence of death for the crime of rape is grossly disproportionate and excessive punishment and is therefore forbidden by the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment." Justices Brennan and Marshall said that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment for any crime. Justice Powell said that the death penalty was inappropriate in this case, where an adult woman was raped without excessive brutality or serious, lasting injury, but it might be appropriate in other circumstances. Chief Justice Burger and Justice Rehnquist dissented, saying that Georgia had the power to impose the death penalty for rape if it wanted to.

The Court's published decision reviews the evolving history of the death penalty for rape, noting that at the time Coker was convicted only Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana continued to provide the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman. The number of states authorizing the death penalty for rape had declined from 18 in 1925 to 16 at the time of Furman v. Georgia in 1972.

Capital rape laws splintered after Furman. Several states did not reenact rape as a capital offense post-Furman, some kept it for children only, and some, like North Carolina and Louisiana, tried to make it mandatory, which caused their statutes to be invalidated on appeal. Only Georgia was left with a valid adult capital rape law, until Coker, providing for a discretionary proceeding similar to its capital murder proceeding: a jury finding of guilt to the capital offense, followed by a penalty phase weighing aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

The Supreme Court had sanctioned this proceeding in Gregg v. Georgia, 96 S.Ct. 2909 (1976), as it applied to capital murder, which showed the other states how to write death penalty laws that met uncertain Supreme Court standards. The opinion in Coker, coming a year later, further clarified the post-Furman ambiguities: capital punishment is not allowed for the rape of an adult who is not killed.

The language of the decision establishes the ideological foundation for a much broader criminal law precedent: the death penalty is not appropriate unless someone is killed. Thus armed robbery, kidnaping, treason, piracy, train wrecking and other formerly capital crimes were struck down by implication, establishing the rule that has prevailed for two decades: for a death sentence to be imposed, the defendant must be convicted of killing another person, and the jury must find that the aggravating circumstances of the crime and the criminal outweigh the mitigating circumstances.

Although the Supreme Court placed Coker in the context of evolving public and legislative attitudes about the crime of rape, noting that most state legislatures had not reenacted capital rape statutes post-Furman, the decision can still be viewed as a bold break with tradition. Chief Justice Burger, in his dissent, commented on the plurality view that since most state legislatures had not reenacted new capital rape statutes in the 70s, support for the death penalty for rape must be waning.

Justice Burger wrote: "When considered in light of the experience since the turn of this century, where more than one-third of American jurisdictions have consistently provided the death penalty for rape, the plurality's focus on the experience of the immediate past must be viewed as truly disingenuous. . . can it rationally be considered a relevant indicator of what our society deems `cruel and unusual' to look solely to what legislatures have refrained from doing under conditions of great uncertainty arising from our less than lucid holdings on the Eighth Amendment?"

In the decade before American executions dwindled to a halt in 1967, awaiting the high court decision that came out in the legally-muddled Furman in 1972, the states and federal government were still executing people for rape, armed robbery, kidnaping and treason. Indeed, the enduring death penalty case of the 1950s was that of Caryl Chessman, who was executed in California on May 2, 1960. Chessman was a convicted kidnapper, sex offender and armed robber, but he was never convicted of killing anyone.

Even as the number of executions being carried out went into a sharp decline in the 1960s, the death penalty remained on the books for a wide variety of offenses. Hugo Bedau's The Death Penalty in America (1967), listed these death penalty crimes:

Number of Capital

Offense Jurisdictions

Homicide 44

Kidnapping 34

Treason 21

Rape 19

Carnal Knowledge 15

Robbery 10

Perjury in a Capital Case 10

Bombing 7

Assault by a Life-Term Inmate 5

Burglary 4

Arson 4

Train Wrecking 2

Train Robbery 2

Espionage 2

As a practical matter, the death penalty had nearly withered away for crimes other than murder and rape. From 1930 to 1967, over 3,300 persons were executed for homicide, 455 for rape, and only 70 (or less than 2% of the total) for all other non-homicidal offenses, including robbery, burglary, attempted murder, kidnaping, assault by a life-term prisoner, carnal knowledge, espionage, assault with intent to rape and accessory to murder.

In this era, executions for rape were carried out exclusively in the Southern states (including the border states of Oklahoma, Missouri and Delaware), and they were carried out predominately on black men convicted of raping white women. Of the 455 rapists executed, 405 (89%) were black.

Professor Marvin Wolfgang's research on the death penalty for rape, reported as "Racial Discrimination in the Death Sentence for Rape" in William Bowers's Executions in America (1974), showed that over one-third of black defendants convicted of raping white victims received death sentences; in all other racial combinations of victim and defendant, only 2% received death sentences. This eighteen-fold heightened likelihood of getting a death sentence had only one possible explanation, Wolfgang concluded after reviewing other possible explanations or linkages: "It is the racial factor of the relationship between the defendant and the victim that results in the penalty of death."

Among the 455 executed rapists were 14 men electrocuted in Louisiana from 1941 to 1957, almost one per year during this period. The basic information about these men and their crimes is presented in Table 1. Their capital cases were processed through Louisiana's legal system at a time when that system was undergoing transition

in four important ways:

1. Electrocution would replace hanging as the means of carrying out the death penalty.

2. State authority would replace local authority in conducting the execution.

3. Lynching, as an informal, popular local practice, would die out as local and then state authorities asserted greater official control over the trial and punishment of capital offenders.

4. Executions would be removed from the public eye, to be carried out in private behind jail and prison walls, becoming first by-invitation-only events and later official-business-only acts done in the dead of night.

In the decades after the Civil War, the administration of the death penalty in Louisiana was left up to people in the parishes. If people were incensed enough about a particular offense and a particular offender, he (or occasionally she) was likely to be lynched without ever going to trial. If the offender got a death sentence at trial, the punishment was carried out by local authorities in public, usually through hanging on a gallows built on the courthouse square, until the execution was later made more private by moving it inside the parish courthouse, in a room specially designed with a trapdoor over a drop below. The trappings of "progress" have often come late to Louisiana: the modern process of electrocuting offenders in a state prison under formal state authority, pioneered by the State of New York at the Auburn Prison in 1890, was not permanently adopted by Louisiana until 1957 (although offenders in an earlier era had been hung at the old Baton Rouge Penitentiary until that institution was closed). Only 11 men were executed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola over the next four years, ending in June 1961, when Louisiana's own moratorium on carrying out executions began. Louisiana would not execute another criminal until 1983.

Between the time of the Civil War and 1940, executions in Louisiana were considerably more informal. Capital crimes were tried at the parish level and offenders were held in parish jails until they were hung in the parish seat. Public hangings prevailed through the 1920s.

Before World War I, it was probably more common for an offender to be lynched than to be executed by lawful authority. The NAACP's Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States counts 313 lynchings--49 whites and 264 blacks--in the period from 1889 to 1918. Frank Shay's Judge Lynch: His First Hundred Years (1938), counts lynchings over a longer period and comes up with a total of 421 through 1937. The average was about 10 per year from the 1890s through World War I, but only about two per year from 1918 through the Depression years.

The last Louisiana lynching I could find a record of was in 1946. A black man, John Jones, who was accused of breaking into a white woman's house, was taken from the Minden jail by a mob and burned to death with a blow torch, after his hands were cut off. A second black man, Albert Harris, was beaten by the mob but not killed.

By the 1940s lynchings had all but died out in Louisiana, and electrocution had replaced hanging as the legal method of execution. Act 14 of the 1940 Legislature provided that effective June 1, 1941, executions were to be carried out by electrocution. Over the next 20 years, 66 men and one woman, Toni Jo Henry, would be electrocuted in the state's portable electric chair--which was transported from parish to parish to do executions until 1957, when it found a permanent home in the Red Hats cellblock at Angola.

In looking at the cases of the 14 men electrocuted for rape, you can find something unique and different about each man and his crime, or the processing of his legal case, or the circumstances of his execution, but there is one overriding aspect of commonality: all were black men, and most were young; all but two were no older than 31 when they committed their crimes.

Age at Victim's Crime Execution

Defendant Race/Gender/Crime Race/Gender/Age Parish Date Date

1. Willie Larkin b/m/27 b/f/? Madison 4-04-42 9-09-42

2. William Hamilton b/m/18 w/f/9 Caddo 9-29-42 12-03-42

3. Anthony Wilson b/m/27 w/f/? Orleans 4-21-42 3-06-44

4. William Ayers b/m/31 w/f/17 Winn 3-??-45 6-28-46

5. Jesse Perkins b/m/39 w/f/? E. Baton Rouge 6-21-46 7-18-47

6. Edward Spriggs b/m/27 w/f/? Iberville 4-05-48 6-25-48

7. L.C. Lloyd b/m/31 w/f/? Tangipahoa 4-23-47 3-11-49*

8. Edward Sanford b/m/46 w/f/20 E. Baton Rouge 8-02-49 12-01-50

9. Edward Honeycutt b/m/23 w/f/? St. Landry 12-01-48 6-08-51

10. Paul Washington b/m/22 w/f/? Jefferson 3-16-48 7-11-52

11. Ocie Jugger b/m/23 w/f/? Jefferson 3-16-48 7-11-52

12. Walter Bentley b/m/26 w/f/13 Orleans 11-19-50 9-06-52

13. John Michel b/m/20 w/f/? Orleans 2-10-53 5-31-57

14. Donald R. Edwards b/m/29 w/f/45 Caddo 6-28-56 9-06-57

*Committed suicide in jail the day of his execution.

The first man electrocuted for rape in Louisiana may have been in the social context the most unusual: Willie Larkin was the only man executed for raping a black woman. Larkin was a 27-year-old black man from Madison Parish. He was "charged with rape by several Negro women," according to the Madison Journal of September 4, 1942. The crime he was tried for was committed on April 4, 1942. He was tried by a jury in Tallulah on May 11, 1942, and found guilty. His death sentence was pronounced on July 13.

The district judge sentenced him to hang, even though hanging was no longer in use. Larkin's attorney objected to electrocution instead of hanging, but the Attorney General, Eugene Stanley, pointed out in a memorandum to Governor Sam H. Jones that the mode of inflicting capital punishment had been changed effective several months before the date of the crime, so no legal points substantiated Larkin's argument.

Larkin was electrocuted in the Madison Parish jail shortly after noon on Wednesday, September 9, 1942, just over five months after his crime. Larkin's mother, who lived in Tallulah, had maintained until a day or two before his death that he would not die but that "dey would send him to war" instead. Larkin said before he died that he "had religion" and was satisfied. Larkin had told his jailer in the days before his death: "A man gets what he works for."

Larkin's record for rapid and unimpeded processing from crime to execution was bettered by the man who came after him. William Hamilton was processed from crime to execution in less than 10 weeks, from September 29, 1942, to December 3, 1942, a speed that seems dazzling in comparison with today's typically glacier-like movement of death penalty cases.

Hamilton's crime was an ugly one in any era: he raped a nine-year-old white schoolgirl in a Shreveport park. The girl was returning from lunch when Hamilton stopped her in Highland Park. According to the original news accounts in the Shreveport Times, Hamilton pointed a gun at the girl and forced her to accompany him into the woods, where the rape occurred. He ran away afterward.

A city street department employee saw Hamilton leave the scene. When police went to Hamilton's home the next day, they found blood-soaked clothing. Hamilton confessed, three times. He said he had gone to the movies after the crime. At his trial on October 19, the evidence of guilt was compelling. The jury deliberated two-and-a-half minutes before returning the death penalty for aggravated rape. Hamilton was sentenced to death October 23, and six weeks later he was executed in the Caddo Parish Jail. Sixty-five days from crime to grave.

Louisiana carried out no executions for rape in 1943. The one black man who was executed in 1944, Anthony Wilson, went to his death proclaiming his innocence. Wilson was a seaman. He was convicted of attacking a 92-pound white woman walking home through the Carrollton section of New Orleans late on the night of April 21, 1942. He was convicted in district court on November 19, the jury ignoring his insanity plea to return a verdict in 40 minutes. Wilson was sentenced on January 15, 1943, and executed in Orleans Parish Prison on March 6, 1944. His attorneys sought a stay of execution, which was denied. The Times-Picayune of March 7 reported that Wilson refused to accept any religious faith. When the barber cut his hair at ten a.m., Wilson was singing the "St. Louis Blues." He was placed in the electric chair at 12:15 p.m., given three shots of electricity, 2,500 volts each, and pronounced dead by the coroner at 12:25 p.m.

William "Willie" Ayers was a 31-year-old farm hand when he raped a 17-year-old white girl near Winnfield, in Winn Parish, in March 1945. He escaped after the rape and was arrested a few weeks later working on a farm near Dixie in Caddo Parish. As his execution date of June 28, 1946, neared, attention was focused more on those who would operate the electric chair than on who would sit in it.

The electrocution of Willie Francis for murder in St. Martinville on May 3, 1946, had been botched. The executioner said, "Goodbye, Willie," and threw the switch. Some current flowed, enough to give Willie a shock but not kill him. After another attempt, the executioner gave up. Willie Francis realized every condemned man's dream: he walked away from the chair. (A year later, on May 9, 1947, after a heavy round of appeals and petitions for clemency, Francis was returned to the chair and successfully executed. He would go to heaven, Francis said, describing heaven as "a place where you have a white suit." See Bob Hamm's articles on the Willie Francis case in the Lafayette Daily Advertiser, April 25 and 26, 1993, for a detailed account of this event.)

Another execution for murder had been carried out without incident in Allen Parish later in May 1946, but the Francis snafu was still in the minds of the press and public as the time to execute Ayers neared. The chair was installed in the Winn Parish Jail, and Ayers was led down to it just after noon on Friday. The executioner threw the switch and said just what he had said to Francis, "Goodbye, Willie." This time the machine worked perfectly. Willie Ayers, as far as anyone knows, got the same white suit Willie Francis aspired to.

The year 1947 would see eight men electrocuted in Louisiana, the most for any year under the modern process until another eight men were executed in 1987. Only one was executed for rape, Jesse Perkins, a 41-year-old Baton Rouge man. Perkins had served time at Angola for manslaughter. He was paroled in 1943 and returned to Baton Rouge.

Perkins was convicted of the aggravated rape of a young white woman in Bogan's pasture, a lover's lane area in Baton Rouge, on May 21, 1946. The woman and her male companion told police they were sitting on a blanket in the pasture when a "Negro crawled up on his hands and knees, pulled a knife on them and threatened their lives. He then raped the woman and fled." They thought it was unusual that the Negro was already bleeding from a neck wound.

Perkins was identified by police when he went to Our Lady of the Lake hospital for treatment. The police investigation showed that Perkins had attacked another couple in Bogan's pasture earlier the same evening. The man, a city bus driver, had fought back and stabbed Perkins in the neck. Police found stolen property in Perkins' home that was taken from yet another robbery in Bogan's pasture, from another bus driver, a month earlier. Police blamed Perkins for other robberies in the area in the weeks before he was caught.

Perkins maintained his innocence throughout his trial and confinement. He said the police had the wrong man. He complained in court that he had been beaten by the police, called a liar, promised light time and "hit so many times he wished he was dead." Perkins said he had been cut when three men attempted to rob him as he walked home.

The rape victim, her companion and the other man who had cut him earlier in the evening all positively identified Perkins as the attacker. The jury deliberated 18 minutes before convicting him of aggravated rate on November 8, 1946. The judge sentenced him to death on January 6, 1947.

Perkins was next-to-the-oldest of the electrocuted rapists and almost surely the most social. He spent his last day visiting with several Baptist preachers, police officials, his attorney, Louis Berry, Sister Tharsilla, who had been bringing him cake in jail, his legal wife, Dorothy Perkins, his common-law wife, Bernice Martin, and his daughter, also named Dorothy. When his family members wept, "he told them not to cry, that he `had made his peace with his Maker' and was going to walk to the chair `like a man.'"

The Baton Rouge Advocate gives this account of Perkins's execution:

"As he was being strapped in the chair Jessie called to the three Negro preachers standing by him, `Be good! You'll meet me, Reverend, and when the roll be called, I'll meet it . . . Come shake hands with me, boys . . . Fine, feeling fine . . .

Say, you tell all my friends to don't doubt me.'

"Asked if had anything to say, the negro replied, `I'm not guilty . . . That's all . . . But I'm willing and ready to go.'"

The switch was thrown at 12:01:30. He survived the first jolt of electricity but not the second. About 50 persons witnessed the execution and another 100 waited outside the Baton Rouge courthouse, which was closed for the execution.

Louis Berry, the black attorney who represented Jesse Perkins, also represented Edward Spriggs, who was executed the next year. Mr. Berry may not have had much to work with: the entire legal processing from crime to execution took 81 days, only 16 days longer than William Hamilton's record-setting pace of 1942.

Spriggs was arrested on Monday, April 5, 1948, in Plaquemine. He was charged with entering a home outside Plaquemine Monday morning, threatening a white woman with a knife and then raping her. The victim had the presence of mind, when the attacker was leaving the house, to grab a pistol and fire six shots at him, The Iberville South reported. All six shots missed.

Spriggs, who had a prior arrest for carnal knowledge of a black girl but no convictions, was arrested by Sheriff C.A. "Bobbie" Griffon, Jr., within four hours. He confessed to the crime, though he would later repudiate the confession. Local authorities took care to see that a black man served on the second grand jury that indicted Spriggs with aggravated rape, after his first indictment was quashed for violating the 14th amendment, and another served on the trial jury that convicted him--in a 22-minute deliberation. The local newspaper remarked how unusual this effort at minority representation was.

When the editor of the paper visited Spriggs in jail the day before his execution, Spriggs told him to come back in the afternoon, that he had a statement to make. The editor found Spriggs eating a piece of ice cold water melon the jailer had given him. Spriggs told the editor: "You can take this down. I committed the crime. Tell my friends I'm sorry. Don't they make the same mistake." Editor J.N. Rials's article says Spriggs repeated two or three times that his advice to other Negro boys and to white ones as well is to stay on the right road, and don't "go wrong like I did."

Spriggs was executed the next day, June 25, 1948. His was the first execution in Iberville Parish since 1906. Spriggs left a widow and two children.

The execution of L.C. Lloyd, scheduled for March 11, 1949, in Amite, the parish seat of Tangipahoa Parish, indicates why authorities maintain a close "death watch" over condemned men in the final hours before their execution. Lloyd appears on lists of executed men as having been electrocuted, but in fact he broke his own neck in his jail cell seven hours before he was to be executed. The parish coroner reported that Lloyd wedged his head between the window sill and a bar and threw his body to one side with such force that his neck snapped. A black trusty heard the noise and called deputies.

Lloyd had been convicted on November 29, 1948, and sentenced to death on December 21, 1948, for the aggravated rape of an older white woman in Independence, Louisiana. On April 23, 1947, the woman was walking into town at dusk. When she passed a lumber yard, a man grabbed her and attacked her. The woman's son came along a short time later, looking for his mother, and found the black man still molesting his mother. The son hit the black man on the head with a piece of lumber and the black man ran away.

Authorities began searching for Lloyd, who had an extensive arrest record for property crimes and had already served 11 years at the state penitentiary--a life sentence in those days--for a rape committed in Franklinton when he was 17. Lloyd undoubtedly knew what would happen to him this time. He escaped into Mississippi, was arrested for window peeping, escaped again, was arrested in Natchez for theft and escaped another time. He was finally captured in Forrest City, Arkansas, 15 months after the crime, and returned to Tangipahoa Parish to stand trial. Court records indicate that after Lloyd's conviction, no appeal was made. His attorneys made no further effort to save his life.

Lloyd was not an easy person to maintain control of. After he was sentenced to death, he kept tearing up his jail cell, destroying equipment and fixtures. He was considered such a security risk he was transferred to the Orleans Parish Prison until four days before his scheduled execution. Even after his return security in the rural parish jail proved to be inadequate, and Lloyd finally found a way to "cheat the electric chair," as the local newspaper reported.

Edward Sanford, who was electrocuted in Baton Rouge on December 1, 1950, also managed to escape the clutches of the law for a time. Sanford committed his aggravated rape in midsummer 1949. A young white girl parked with her boy friend near the LSU quail farm on Perkins Road told police "a large Negro came up to their car, fired a shot into the windshield, then proceeded to rob them. He attacked her, she said, outside the car while he held a gun on her companion." The man told the couple he had killed five persons already. They offered him money and he replied: "I want you."

Police suspected Sanford from the description the 20-year-old victim gave. He fled to New Orleans, where he was arrested in a shack by the industrial canal, on October 22, 1949. His trial started five weeks later, on November 29, 1949. Sanford's attorneys had asked for the trial to be moved out of Baton Rouge. One of them told the court: "A Negro charged with rape of a white woman has two-and-a-half strikes against him before his trial begins."

When the defense suggested that Sanford had been coerced or tricked into confessing, Sheriff Clemmons testified that Sanford not only wanted to confess but wanted to plead guilty. In closing arguments, the black defense attorney had no other recourse left: "I'm pleading for the life of an ignorant Negro." It took the jury 25 minutes to bring in a death verdict, and Sanford was formally sentenced to death on March 3, 1950.

The Baton Rouge Advocate has this account of Edward Sanford's execution:

"A single, minute-long charge of electricity at 12:18 p.m. ended the life of the big, rawboned Negro, whose last words were, `I'm not guilty of this by myself.'

"The last words addressed to him were, `Goodbye, Edward.'

They were spoken by the state's executioner as he, standing beside Sanford and wearing a big cowboy hat, jerked down the switch."

In the summer of the following year, the traveling executioner took his chair to the St. Landry Parish Jail in Opelousas to execute Edward Honeycutt, a black man from rural Farmersville who had been 23 years old when he committed his crime on December 1, 1948. Honeycutt was charged with raping a young St. Landry Parish farm wife with her two children, ages five and three, in the house. The crime took place on a farm road off U.S. Highway 190 outside Eunice.

The legal processing of the Honeycutt case followed a road about as rough as the one leading to the farm. Honeycutt was tried and given a death sentence in 1949. The Louisiana Supreme Court overturned the conviction because no blacks had served on the grand jury. He was reindicted and retried the next year.

Before he was brought to trial again, three white men removed him from the St. Landry Parish Jail and transported him to the Atchafalaya River. When they flipped a coin to see who would kill him--apparently unaware that lynching was no longer a social convention--Honeycutt jumped into the river and hung onto a limb until sheriff's deputies rescued him.

In the May 1950 second trial, the victim was identified and quoted by name. She was described as a "petite Eunice farm wife." She testified that when she responded to a knock on her front door, a black man pulled a gun on her. He forced his way inside and threatened to kill her and the two children.

Honeycutt was picked up in the area later in the afternoon and taken to the victim, who identified him: "He's the one." The defense claimed mistaken identity. One attorney said there "must be more than one `tall, heavy-set Negro' around Eunice." A black farm wife and neighbor of the victim testified she saw Honeycutt enter the victim's home and later run into the woods behind the farmhouses.

Honeycutt was defended by three black attorneys--the indomitable Louis Berry, and his colleagues V.B. Lacour and E.W. Jackson. One of these men is said to have pointed out that in Louisiana since 1907 no white man but 29 negroes had been condemned to death for rape.

If his count was right, Honeycutt would make number 30. The jury was out 24 minutes. He was formally sentenced on June 2, 1950. After another appeal, this one unsuccessful, Honeycutt's execution was set for June 8, 1951.

Honeycutt was interviewed by Lafayette Daily Advertiser City Editor Vincent Marino the day before his execution. Honeycutt told him: "I don't mind going to the chair, but it's something I didn't do." A few minutes later, he said, "I don't know. I can't think. My mind is all flubbergated, but I'm not afraid."

Honeycutt could neither read nor write. His parents had come to see him in jail only once or twice. He was pleased that his girl friend had come to read to him through his cell door the day before he was to die.

He did not resist as he was strapped into the electric chair. Two shocks were administered, at 12:05 and 12:08. He was pronounced dead at 12:12:30 on June 8, 1951. Among the 100 spectators present in the jail to observe the execution were the victim and her husband.

Louisiana's only double electrocution for aggravated rape took place on July 11, 1952, in the Jefferson Parish Jail. The two men executed were Paul Washington and Ocie Jugger. Their crime had been committed over four years earlier, in March 1948. Escapes and legal complications, based on Washington's claims of innocence and inadequate representation, resulted in the long delay, unusual in Louisiana for the era, before the pair were finally executed.

The crime for which Paul Washington and Ocie Jugger were executed was committed on March 15, 1948, in the Shrewsbury section of Jefferson Parish, off Highway 90 across the Orleans Parish line. A black man broke into the home of a married white woman, stole jewelry and raped the woman.

Two days later, a man named Vincent North pawned a watch taken in the crime at a pawn shop on Rampart Street. When North was questioned by the police, he said the watch had been given him by a friend, Paul Washington. When Washington was questioned, he implicated Jugger. Both were jailed and charged with aggravated rape.

At their trial on November 20, 1948, both Jugger and Washington were found guilty and given death sentences. The sentence was not formally imposed until November 17, 1949. A month after sentencing, on the day his appeal was filed with the Supreme Court, Jugger pried off a radiator grill and escaped the Jefferson Parish Jail through an air vent. He remained free for over two years, until he was stopped for a traffic violation in Houston in February 1952. He was returned to Jefferson Parish to await execution.

Washington's case had already been appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court without success. The Louisiana Pardon Board, on April 2, 1952, declined to commute the pair's death sentences.

On April 15, Jugger gave a written statement to Alvin B. Jones, Washington's attorney, in which he assumed all guilt for the burglary and rape. Washington knew nothing of either crime; he was just waiting nearby while Jugger went inside the house, Jugger said. Washington had not testified to these facts at the trial, but he wished it be known that he was innocent of the crimes for which he was about to be executed.

The Pardon Board met again to consider the new evidence and on April 23 again rejected clemency for Washington, writing, "all of the facts and circumstances in the case still fail to justify clemency." A death warrant was signed for July 11, 1952.

Washington and Jugger were executed in the Gretna jail on a Friday afternoon. The New Orleans Times-Picayune account reads:

"First to enter the death room was Washington, a big, heavily built man. He watched impassively as the executioner strapped his arms and legs to the chair.

"As the executioner placed the black skull helmet on his head, Washington said: `I know my Lord is satisfied.' He was masked. The executioner moved to the switch in the portable control box beside the chair.

"`Goodbye, Paul,' said the executioner. On the last word, he threw the switch. It was 12:09:30 p.m."

Another round of current was necessary when Washington's heart fluttered. He was pronounced dead at 12:14 p.m.

Jugger was brought into the room at 12:26 p.m., accompanied by a Baptist minister. When he was asked if had anything to say, he whispered, "God be with me--my soul is safe."

Jugger turned to the jail superintendent and said, "I thank you for all the good treatment--may God be with all you men--that's all." Two charges were administered, and Jugger was pronounced dead at 12:31:30 p.m.

On the day of Washington and Jugger's execution, the front page of the Times-Picayune was devoted to national political news--Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon were nominated for President and Vice-President at the Republican national convention in Chicago. The account of double electrocution, the only two ever performed in Jefferson Parish, was buried on page 24.

Later in 1952 Walter Bentley was executed in Orleans Parish. Bentley was convicted of breaking into a house in the Lakeview area of New Orleans on November 19, 1950. When he found a 13-year-old white girl, a babysitter, sleeping on a couch, he woke her up, threatened her with a knife and raped her.

Bentley held the teenager captive about two hours. She was finally able to scream for help. Neighbors came to the front door, and Bentley fled. He was captured on the lakefront about 3:30 a.m. Police recognized him from his description, which included a "Hitler-type mustache with a goatee."

More important for Bentley's capital trial in February 1951 were fingerprints he left on a filing cabinet in the home, and the signed confession he gave police. He had a criminal record going back to 1938, when he was 14 years old. He had already served nine years at Angola for armed robbery. Bentley was found guilty on February 13, 1951, and sentenced to death on March 30, 1951.

Bentley's execution on September 26, 1952, was apparently unremarkable, made even more so by the changed hour of the event. He was reported to be the first person executed under the new state law setting the time of executions between midnight and three a.m.

Only a few official witnesses were present for the early Friday morning electrocution--"in a room entirely cut off from view of all persons except those permitted by law." Bentley was pronounced dead at 12:13 a.m.

Even as the cases of Honeycutt and Washington and Jugger and Bentley were making their ways through the legal system, opposition to the death penalty for rape was building. Like the abrupt decline of lynching after the First World War, the imposition of death for non-fatal rape went into sharp decline after 1950.

One case in particular, not in Louisiana but in Virginia, focused widespread public and legal attention on the discriminatory application of the death penalty for rape. This was the case of the "Martinsville Seven"--seven black men who were electrocuted, four on February 2 and the other three on February 5, 1951, for the rape of 32-year-old white woman in Martinsville, Virginia.

As Eric Rise has established in his research on the case (see "Race, Rape and Radicalism: The Case of the Martinsville Seven, 1949-1951, in The Journal of Southern History, August 1992, pages 461 to 490; or see the full-length account, The Martinsville Seven and Southern Justice: Race, Crime and Capital Punishment in Virginia, 1949-1951, Rise's Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Florida, 1992), the Virginia trial judge's insistence on following the procedural rules of a "fair trial" obliged the NAACP attorneys to broaden their attack on racism within the American legal system. What more obvious practice of racism within the criminal courts remained than the grossly disproportionate use of the death penalty against black men who had raped white women?

Walter Bentley was the last man executed for rape under local authority in Louisiana. Almost five years elapsed before the next black man would be executed for rape, and this execution would not take place in a parish jail. In 1956 the legislature changed the execution procedure to do away with the traveling electric chair. The Department of Institutions sought $250,000 to build a new death house at Angola. When the money could not be found, the warden had an office at the Red Hats disciplinary cellblock remodeled to hold the electric chair.

Joe Washington was electrocuted for murder in the Caddo Parish Jail on May 21, 1957, and then the traveling chair was taken off the road--to its new home at the isolated camp behind the Main Prison at Angola. The dubious distinction of being the first man to die in the electric chair at Angola went to John Michel, convicted of aggravated rape out of Orleans Parish.

Michel, whose name is sometimes listed as John J. Michaels, was 20 years old when he raped a white woman in New Orleans on February 10, 1953. Newspaper accounts always refer to the crime as occurring during "Carnival season." He was convicted on May 28, 1953, and sentenced to death by electrocution on November 9, 1953. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed his conviction on December 5, 1955. Governor Earl Long signed Michel's death warrant, which fixed the execution date at May 31, 1957, between the hours of midnight and three a.m.

Michel's execution went off with no problems. He was described as going to his death "calmly." Warden Maurice Sigler said Michel entered the death chamber at 12:10 a.m., accompanied by two Catholic priests. Michel expressed his appreciation to those present for what they had done for him. The switch was thrown and Michel was pronounced dead at 12:20 a.m. Three months later Donald Rufus Edwards became the last convicted rapist to die in Angola's electric chair. Edwards was an ex-convict who had done time at Angola for burglary. On June 28, 1956, he was prowling a Shreveport residential neighborhood looking for a home to burglarize. When he broke into a home on Monrovia Street, he found a 45-year-old white woman alone in the house, her husband and daughter out of town on a business trip. He held a knife to the woman and raped her, cutting her in the process. He then had the naked woman accompany him around the house, searching for valuables. He took several items, including a diamond wedding band. Then he raped the woman again and left the house.

Edwards was arrested later the same night. He had the victim's wedding ring in his pocket and other stolen items in his possession. His thumb print was on a dresser drawer in the bedroom. He made a full confession to police within 12 hours after his arrest. The victim positively identified him as the attacker. His defense at trial in November? He didn't do the crime: it must have been someone else.

The jury quickly brought in the death penalty verdict on November 16, 1956. On November 23, 1956, he was sentenced to be electrocuted. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed his conviction on April 1, 1957. No request for a rehearing was made. Governor Earl Long issued Edwards's death warrant on July 30.

The execution was set for September 6, 1957, 14 months after he committed the crime. Edwards was brought into the death chamber at 12:05 a.m. Warden Sigler asked him if he had anything to say. Edwards replied that "he was a Christian and that he did not rape the woman. He also expressed appreciation for his treatment at the prison." The event proceeded and Edwards was pronounced dead at 12:21 a.m.

The execution of Donald Rufus Edwards, the last of Louisiana's 14 electrocuted rapists, did not mark an abrupt end to efforts to impose the death penalty for rape in Louisiana. On the day Edwards was electrocuted, Acting Governor Lether Frazar signed death warrants for two New Orleans men, Edgar Labat and Clifton Poret, who were on Death Row for the aggravated rape of a white woman in New Orleans on November 12, 1950. Their execution date was set for September 20, 1957, two weeks after the Edwards execution.

Poret and Labat were never executed. The night before they were to be executed, their new attorneys got a federal judge to issue a stay. One stay led to another, and Poret and Labat, both of whom claimed to be completely innocent of this crime, became the Caryl Chessman of Louisiana. Their case remained in the federal courts until after Louisiana stopped executing people in 1961.

They remained on Death Row at Angola for several more years. An inventory of inmates as of August 8, 1966, listed 33 names. Twelve of them were black men convicted of aggravated rape:

Inmate Parish Sentence Date

Wilbert Augustine Orleans 6-07-60

Roosevelt Hughes Orleans 3-19-63

Isaac Peart Orleans 12-16-55

Eugene Scott E. Baton Rouge 7-26-61

Emmett Henderson Morehouse 11-10-61

Alton Poret Orleans 3-23-53

Clarence Wilson Tangipahoa 6-23-60

Andrew Scott Livingston 9-11-60

Edgar Labat Orleans 3-23-53

Earl Clark Plaquemine 2-06-65

Bruce Barksdale Orleans 3-16-64

Hezekiah Brown Orleans 6-14-65

None of these were ever executed. The last man executed in Louisiana, prior to the 22-year moratorium that ended in 1983 under the new post-Gregg statute, was Jessie James Ferguson. He was executed on June 9, 1961, for the rape and murder of Joyce Marie Thibodeaux, an 11-year-old Opelousas girl. Even without the murder, Ferguson would have been a prime candidate for the death penalty. His criminal record included six previous rape charges, including one for which he served a ten-and-a-half year life sentence at Angola. The most likely reason Ferguson lived as long as he did was that he only raped black victims. At his execution, Ferguson is remembered for his last words: "Pray for me. Don't let it hurt."

After Ferguson, executions remained in limbo until the Furman decision in 1972 wiped Death Row clean. The 43 people on Death Row in Louisiana at the time had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, and most of them were eventually released from prison at their parole or good-time release dates. In 1991 the state legislature changed Louisiana's method of capital punishment to lethal injection, so the 87 people--86 men and one woman--who were electrocuted in Louisiana from 1941 to 1991 make up a roster unlikely to be changed in the future. The dead rapists from this era make up a doubly untimely bunch: both their crime and their manner of death have become extinct.