The judge who presided over and created the false claim of a slave revolt conspiracy was Daniel Horsmanden, on his way to becoming the chief judge of New York – a position he maintained until the Revolution. Rather, it was the collective act of anger, frustration, and retaliation by the enslaved for being held in bondage. ![]() This was not a revolt calculated to overthrow the slave system – though that would have been more than justified. His action unleashed the pent-up anger of his fellow Africans who joined in starting a spate of fires to buildings and haystacks. Specifically, one of those enslaved people, Quack, was repeatedly refused entry to Fort George to see his wife- who was enslaved there as a cook. The underlying cause of the sweeping death sentences was the maintenance of the intolerable condition of human beings being treated as non-human private property. All in what the Court and prosecution labeled a slave revolt. Thirteen of the Black people were burned alive at the stake. Three white people were executed for participating in the larcenies and conspiring in the “revolt”, and one white man was executed for the capital offense of being a Jesuit priest and joining in the revolt conspiracy. The immediate motive for the sweeping death law was the upsurge in the banned behaviors by those angry at the government’s strictly enforcing the previously loosely or unenforced regulations.Įighteen years later, in 1741, in British New York, thirty enslaved human beings whose faces were born “blacked” were executed for setting fires and committing larcenies. The statute was sheparded through parliament by Robert Walpole on his way to becoming prime minister. Prohibited behavior included killing or hunting deer or rabbits, cutting down trees, undamning fishponds, setting fires to buildings or haystacks and having their faces “blacked.”. In 1723, Britain enacted the Black Act, adding fifty crimes to those punishable by death – the most ever in a single statute. Until then, the record had stood in Anglo-American law for 271 years. These killings were made possible by the largest ever expansion of the federal death penalty in 1994, adding sixty new capital crimes. To understand just how astounding and outside of hundreds of years of prior government behavior these thirteen homicides were, we have to put them in their historical context. Enabled by a stacked Supreme Court that didn’t pause to examine the prisoners’ intellectual disability, mental illness, innocence, jury racial bias or any other of the myriad mitigation evidence, the federal death chamber at Terre Haute executed an unprecedented number of people in such a short period: Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy, Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Lisa Marie Montgomery, Corey Johnson and Dustin John Higgs. ![]() Over the final six months of Donald Trump’s reign, his minions managed to kill thirteen human beings who were on federal death row.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |