The 8th amendment states that no persons shall be subject to cruel and unusual punishment. So if this is true, then why were lynchings allowed back in the day?
I’m talking about those public gatherings where they would find a criminal, almost always black, and they would torture him until he dies. I mean, obviously, since it was public, shouldn’t the police have stopped it? After all, murder is being committed right out in the open.
And when I say “almost always black,” I don’t mean that blacks were the main contributors to crime, but rather, I’m trying to point out that it seems lynchings were only allowed on blacks. I know whites have also been lynched, but not nearly as much as blacks. So, what’s the SD?
You’ve just answered your own question: Yes, the police should have stopped it. There were a lot of folks not doing what they should have. Lynching was, and is, illegal and wrong.
Lynchings were never official. They were/are a form of vigilante justice, which occured because a sizable fraction of the local population felt that justice was not done by the courts. Lynchings happened to plenty of whites, too. It’s just the most publicized cases of lynchings were by the KKK. But in the days of the American frontier, often lynch mobs were the only way any kind of justice would get done, because there were so few courts in the frontier regions.
For the same reason that slavery existed even though the Bill of Rights said “all men are created equal”. People applied the law differently to different people. Then there was that little tiff known as The Civil War…
I submit that justice was never done that way, either. In fact, the vast majority of lynchings in the Old West were carried out in settled communities where there were judges and elected or appointed peace officers. They usually involved mobs that feared, for whatever reason, that the accused might not be given the death penalty.
A few lynchings in the West probably were successful in “executing” the correct perpetrators of some crimes. That does not quite meet my idea of the standard of “justice.”
Occasionally a man was hanged by a mob and history has pretty well vindicated their belief that he was guilty of the crime of which he was accused. On the other hand, if “history” and the local mob agree on his guilt, it is probable that he would have been convicted and sentenced by the courts, as well. More typically, a group of citizens in some town such as Lordsburg or Julesburg would decide that they were tired of having gambling or other “bad” things in their midst and they would go out and hang a bunch of guys that were not sufficiently politically connected to avoid that fate. In the territories (especially western Oklahoma) there were, indeed, places that were nearly “outside” the law. On the other hand, those places were considered lawless and people did not build towns there. Summary “justice” was more often carried out by a bullet than a lynching. (Once the U.S. marshalls began patrolling Oklahoma, they hardly needed lynchings. The Federal judge for the territory spent the better part of 20 years hanging nearly everyone who was brought before him.)
I can’t defend lynching, but here is a little info to give a little more insight into this time-honored tradition:
With the most reliable statistics available, there appears to have been about 5000 reported cases of lynching from the 1880s to the 1960s. (No reliable info before that period.)
Over 70% of the victims were Black.
About 2/3 of the cases (regardless of race) involved vigilante justice. That is, a self-appointed posse deemed it necessary to mete out justice, opting to overlook legal impediments like due process.
Between 1950 and 1968, there were 13 documented lynchings.
And, as always, statistics are subject to interpretation.
I guess my main point was just to echo what Tom said in that lynching was often carried out because the mob thought the person might not get the death penalty, as opposed to the “good-ole-boys-goin’-coon-huntin’” that we typically think of–although that did happen.
Originally, lynching did not necessarily involve killing people though that is the way we use the word today. Apparently, people could be “lynched” who were only tarred and feathered or punished in some other “playful” way by a mob. The key point was that it involved a complete lack of due process.
See the American Heritage dictionary - http://www.bartleby.com/61/64/L0306400.html - for a good history of the word “lynch” - apparently after Captain William Lynch who with his neighbors liked to perform a little justice on the local Tories around the time of the American Revoluntion.
I also posted a question a couple of weeks ago about “Willie Lynch” who is incorrectly credited by the paranoiac for the origin of the word “lynch.” They also appear to believe the myth that he gave a speech in 1712 teaching American slave owners how to keep their slaves. See for example http://thetalkingdrum.com/wil.html. Many have discredited the “speech” - see for example http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/ht20030929lynch.asp - but I’d still like to find out who invented it.
“The nickname has negative connotations because of its definition. Lynching is historically known as murdering by mob action without lawful trial, as defined by Webster’s. African-Americans were lynched often during the years before and after the Civil War. But the term originated from Charles Lynch, a Virginia planter and patriot who, during the American Revolution, led an irregular court formed to punish Loyalists.”
American Lynching - cite: http://users.bestweb.net/~rg/lynchings/Gode%20Davis%20Questions.htm
"Colonel Charles Lynch and his brother William Lynch were both renowned for vigilante “justice” against Tories and “malingerers” (and others apparently) in Virginia from about 1773 until at least 1800. The brothers’ stories are not identical, but both flogged, tarred and feathered, and occasionally hanged men that they’d convicted in their “frontier” courts. (Only coastal Virginia wasn’t considered the frontier in those days.) According to sources like Charles Cutler, both could have just as easily been tagged with the “lynching” term’s origin to describe their activities. Charles Lynch was actually exonerated for anything he might have done in the “name of American liberty” during our Revolutionary War by the Virginia Legislature. It isn’t true that they never killed anyone in their process – in fact, even acts like a relatively mild application of tar could lead to fatal blood poisoning in a few days or weeks – let alone some of the floggings that the brothers (separately) inflicted on supposed miscreants. That said, it is probably true that lynching was often just a non-lethal punishment, or intended as such, during their era. In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1830s, when the so-called “penny presses” came into vogue (cheap, sensationalistic, tabloid-like newspapers), that lynching came to mean an extralegal mob-perpetrated event resulting in death. But by the 1830s, the term “lynching” began to be referred to commonly in the national, by which I mean, American, conversation. Charles Lynch was exonerated by the Virginia Legislature shortly after the Revolutionary War, in 1783, for “all crimes he might have committed in the pursuit of justice.”
I have nothing much to add to the answers that have been given, but i wanted to point people to an amazing source on the phenomenon of lynching.
It’s a book called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, compiled and edited by James Allen. It contains lynching photos and postcards (yes, they did exist) from the nineteenth and early twentieht centuries. Some of the pictures show the extent to which lynchings were large, public events, often with the explicit approval and participation of the police.
There is an amazing website associated with the book, where you can view the pictures, and even watch them as a flash movie with narration by James Allen.
I always have conflicting feelings about this project. As a historian, i feel that it’s a valuable contribution to our knowledge about the past, and a timely reminder of how ugly human history can be. At the same time, i always feel faintly voyeuristic when looking at these images; they bring out people’s morbid fascination, as well as their compassion.