Apropos of the Ray Towler exoneration
NPR features, this week, a documentary on the execution for rape of Willie McGee (picture) on their program
Radio Diaries. McGee was put to death a couple of minutes past midnight on May 8, 1951 in Laurel, Mississippi. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his death penalty appeal.
McGee was publically executed in a "traveling" electric chair (pic) with an audience of 1,000 on the courthouse lawn. There is a radio recording of the execution which is featured in the documentary. The crowd's celebration at the moment of McGee's death is clearly evident from the tape recording. A book,
The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex and Secrets in the Jim Crow South is due out from Harpers, next week.
From about 1940 on, the mobile electric chair went county to county throughout Mississippi providing "closure" in capital cases. We can only wonder at how many innocent men and women met their fate in this apparatus.
We're so much more humane nowadays with the needle and gurney, don't you think?
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