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After its founding in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People began a campaign against lynching. For the first time southern leaders became fearful that the killings and publicity surrounding them might damage the region's economic prospects, and they began to condemn lynching. The number of lynchings began to decline after 1910, largely because of the rise of "legal lynching": quick judicial trials that offered black defendants only marginally more constitutional protection than did a lynch mob. As the number of lynchings fell, the number of state-imposed executions rose just as quickly. In a half-dozen southern states, those executions took place in the electric chair, that latest symbol of humanitarian progress. Between 1908 and 1930, Carl Adams's chair in Virginia killed 148 people, all but 17 of them black.11

IN 1913 ARKANSAS, Indiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Vermont adopted the electric chair, and by 1930 those states had been joined by Texas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, the District of Columbia, Illinois, and New Mexico. In 1924 Nevada became the first state to adopt an even newer method: placing prisoners in an airtight chamber and filling it with hydrocyanic gas. For a decade Nevada remained the only state to use gas. Critics believed the new method—with its claustrophobic chamber and invisible agent of death—was worse than electricity, and the recent experience of poison gas deaths in World War I offered no reassurance. In 1933, however, Colorado and Arizona built gas chambers, and by 1955 eight more states followed suit, convinced that the gas chamber marked another step in the march of progress. The matter remained open to dispute, because bungled gas executions sometimes caused prisoners to gasp and choke as they died. As a result, some states continued to opt for electrocution. Between 1935 and 1949 five states adopted the chair: Connecticut, South Dakota, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia. In all, twenty-five states plus the District of Columbia passed electrocution laws.12

The controversy surrounding electrocution never disappeared. There was evidence that, in some cases, electrocution killed fairly quickly But throughout the century electrocutions often went horribly wrong, causing prisoners to suffer the extreme pain that accompanies cardiac arrest, tetanic muscle contraction, asphyxiation, boiling body fluids, and severe burns.13

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY there was strong support for capital punishment at all levels of society. Over the course of the twentieth century, doubts grew about the morality of the death penalty and its effectiveness as a deterrent. Nine states abolished capital punishment between 1907 and 1917; however, in the wake of the race riots and Red Scare that followed World War I, five of those nine states reinstated it. By the 1920s, all but five states imposed capital punishment. The number of executions peaked during the Great Depression in 1935, when 199 criminals were put to death.14

For the next four decades, the execution rate declined steadily Many people came to believe that crime resulted from mental illness or corrupting childhood influences; if criminal acts did not result from free choice, the argument for deterrence lost all force. Notorious cases in which the guilt of the condemned was widely doubted—such as those involving Sacco and Vanzetti or the Scottsboro boys—also produced doubts about the wisdom of this irrevocable sentence. Gallup polls showed that between the 1930s and the 1960s, support for capital punishment declined in the United States, until opponents slightly outnumbered supporters, even in the South. By 1965 fourteen states had abolished capital punishment, the most ever. Even in states that retained the death penalty, juries were reluctant to impose it. Judges, affected by the same social trends, became more receptive to appeals from death-row inmates. By the late 1960s, the U.S. legal