Tiny Rhode Island carries the distinction of being the earliest US state to abolish capital punishment and the most memorable use of it in state history was in the colonial era when 26 pirates were hanged in Providence in a mass execution on July 19, 1723. A smaller mass hanging in 1738 saw four pirates put to death. Since US independence, Rhode Island only executed eight persons. The finale involved an Irish immigrant named John Gordon who was accused of the beating death of Amasa Sprague, a texile mill owner, on the last day of 1843. The Spragues were a prominent Rhode Island family and Amasa's brother William occupied one of Rhode Island's two Senate seats. Amasa had been subjected to considerable brutality and his skull was fractured in two places.John Gordon's brothers Nicholas and William had immigrated to the United States from Ireland about a decade earlier and operated a tavern and general store, which were now doing brisk business. John himself had only come over to the states a few months before the murder took place. However, many of the workers at Amasa Sprague's mill frequented the tavern and came into work drunk. Sprague was not happy with this and used his political connections to get the place closed down.
The Gordon brothers were all tried for the murder of Sprague but only John was convicted. Evidence at the trial was sketchy, including broken parts of a gun near the body, witnesses claiming to have seen one of the brothers carrying a gun, and a prostitute who serviced the Gordon brothers hearing one of them vowing to kill Sprague. However, she didn't know any of their first names--it would eventually be discovered that her pimp was the brother of one of the judges presiding over Gordon's trial. The jury included no Irish and the judges instructed them to give more weight to the testimony of Anglo witnesses over Irish ones. After a nine day trial they found John Gordon guilty of capital murder. He was hanged on February 13, 1845.The state of Rhode Island abolished capital punishment in 1852, making it the earliest state to do so (Wisconsin became the second a year later) but the death penalty was revived in 1873. It was never used and finally removed from the books in 1984. A proposal to revive it was floated in the state legislature in the 1990s but met with resistance when critics brought up the Gordon execution and cited it as an example of how an innocent person could be wrongfully executed.
In 2011, Irish-American playright Ken Dooley wrote and produced a stage play "The Murder Trial of John Gordon" which ran 21 times at Cranston's Park Theater and it led to state legislators proposing that Governor Lincoln Chafee posthumously pardon Gordon. One of the governor's ancestors had been a business associate of Amasa Sprague, and he signed the pardon on June 29 (Sprague's textile mill went under in the 1873 economic depression and a great great uncle of Chafee's was named a trustee and later got into protracted legal disputes over the mill's assets). The Roman Catholic Church and the ACLU had lobbied for the pardon, arguing that Gordon was a victim of anti-Catholic, anti-Irish bigotry. "John Gordon was put to death because he was Catholic," said Father Bernard Healey of the Diocese of Providence. "It was Catholics in the 19th century. Who will it be this century?"State representative Peter Martin argued "Some people tell me this is a waste of time when the state has more pressing issues including a $331 million deficit. This was an injustice done by the state of Rhode Island by our predecessors. We have a lot of responsibilities to the citizens of Rhode Island. Justice is one of them, isn't it?"
>>16769551>>16769545>>16769543Is this another case like with nog lynchings where the evidence that the accused did it was staggering but like 130 years later we have to redeem him because social justice points?
>>16769551how in God's name does a postage-stamp sized state with fewer people in it than NYC and LA accumulate a deficit of $331 million?
