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By Root 986 0

but did not stop there. Executions would take place not at the county jail but within the walls of three state prisons: Auburn, not far from Syracuse; Clinton, in northern New York near the Canadian border; and Sing Sing, along the Hudson River about thirty miles north of Manhattan. Fewer than twenty witnesses would be allowed at each execution: a Supreme Court justice, the sheriff and district attorney from the county of conviction, two physicians, and "twelve reputable citizens" selected by the prison warden. The bill included an unusual press restriction: "No account of the details of any such execution, beyond the statement of the fact that such convict was, on the day in question, duly executed according to law at the prison, shall be published in any newspaper."2

The most surprising aspect of the bill had to do with the disposition of the prisoner's corpse. Doctors would conduct a postmortem examination, after which the prisoner's body was to be either turned over to a medical school for dissection or buried "with a sufficient quantity of quick-lime to consume such body without delay." Under no circumstances could a relative or friend claim the corpse, and "no religious or other services shall be held over the remains." Although the commissioners had chosen a killing method that would not mutilate the victim's body, as guillotine and garrote would, they recommended dissecting the corpse and obliterating it with quicklime. The "criminal classes . . . are certainly very indifferent as to the infliction of death," the commissioners explained, so capital punishment by itself would serve no deterrent purpose. But those same classes were also "superstitious" and would avoid committing a crime if "they were certain that after execution their bodies were to be cut up in the interest of medical science."3

Dissection was, in fact, widely feared. A corpse was considered sacred, and strong taboos forbade desecrating it or denying it proper burial. When gibbeting and dismemberment fell from favor a century earlier, officials settled on dissection as an alternative way to add horror to a capital sentence. (Dissection laws also provided medical schools with corpses, always a scarce commodity.) American judges, sensitive to the public horror it provoked, rarely sentenced the condemned to dissection. The death penalty commissioners hoped to remove the judges' discretion by making dissection mandatory.4

The quicklime poured into the coffin would prevent the corpse from becoming a commercial attraction. After an 1878 hanging in Pittsfield, 119 Massachusetts, the victim's father-in-law collected the body and put it on exhibit, charging admission of ten cents a head. A New York dime museum claimed to own the pickled head of Charles Guiteau, executed assassin of President James Garfield, while a competing museum advertised "The Head and Right Arm of Anton Probst, The Murderer of the Deering Family, amputated after Execution." After one New York execution, armed guards stood watch at the man's grave. "I'm not going to have any dime museum get ahead of me," a prison official vowed. "The graves will be watched until there is nothing down below."5

Electrical execution devices would be so expensive and complex that they could not be provided at every county jail, as gallows were. The commissioners, however, provided two reasons for moving executions to the three state prisons, and neither involved technology. First, they explained that the new location would make escape more difficult, county jails being notoriously insecure. And, because the site of execution would be far removed from the scene of the crime, the prisoner's friends would be less likely to gather outside the jail and express sympathy for the condemned, a common practice that was, the commissioners believed, "discreditable to public decency and dangerous to public peace." Like so much of American society, executions would become centralized and bureaucratized, the dangers of local variation removed.6

The death commissioners saw their main duty as controlling what they called