Pharaoh “Ferry” Jackson Chesney eye-witnessed and chronicled almost a century of political, economic, and geographic turmoil before he died July 4, 1902, somewhere between 100 and 125 years of age. — When an enslaved Virginia native named Pharaoh Jackson was sold in November 1841 by his owner, Corbin Jackson, to John Chesney for $421, Jackson recorded on the bill of sale that Ferry was 50 years of age. Almost everyone, however, disputed that estimate. In his 1902 biography of Ferry, Dr…

Michael Graham spent 14-years on death row in Angola Prison for a crime he never committed. — If you would like to help Michael, please visit a GoFundMe set up by Death Penalty Action President Abe Bonowitz. Thank you! In 1987, two Roanoke, Virginia men, Michael Graham and Albert Burrell, traveled to Louisiana for a two-week search for construction work that turned into a 14-year living hell…

“Past criminal tendencies” convinces a Boston judge in 1837 to hand down the extreme sentence — IN EARLY JUNE OF 1837, two orphan boys who lived at the almshouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were tried for the crime of arson. Thirteen-year-old Michael Monohon and 10-year-old Michael Whaylan were both charged with setting fire to a barn on the property, which according to the June 1837 New Yorker…

The Ugly Consequences of Bestiality in Colonial America Resulted in the First Juvenile Execution — Dale M. Brumfield “And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death: and ye shall slay the beast.” -Leviticus 20:15 IN AUGUST, 1642, an oblivious Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts man walked into a barn to encounter a teenage boy engaged in a sexual act with…

On the cold night of November 28, 1942, about 1,000 Bostonians jammed into the wildly popular Cocoanut Grove nightclub to both take their minds off the war overseas and the 55–12 drubbing the Boston College Eagles had taken on the football field that afternoon at the hands of underdog Holy Cross. — Dale M. Brumfield First opening in 1927 at Boston’s 17 Piedmont Street as a prohibition-era “speakeasy,” the then-mobster-owned Cocoanut Grove fell on hard times during the depression but was enjoying new life during the early years of World War II, becoming THE place to be seen.

In 1995, a loaded gun was found inside an inmate’s modified typewriter on Virginia’s death row. How did it get there? — This is an excerpt from my latest book, “Closing the Slaughterhouse: The Inside story of Death Penalty Abolition in Virginia,” available worldwide at all online sellers. LONG TIME VIRGINIA DEATH ROW INMATE WILLIE LLOYD TURNER once claimed to journalist Laura Lafay that he resented corrections officials’ attempts to make him…

Joe Munch holds the record for the shortest prison sentence ever Crime and punishment stories are filled with extremes, especially in sentencing. Thai native Chamoy Thipyaso was a woman sentenced to an incredible 1,41,078 years for her involvement in a pyramid scheme that conned more than 16,000 Thailand residents. Years later, a law passed in Thailand stipulated that the maximum prison…

The Hanging of 12-Year-old Hannah Ocuish — THE EXECUTION OF CHILDREN is one of the darkest legacies of America’s slavery and capital punishment histories. Between 1642 and 1924, an estimated 102 American juveniles were convicted and executed prior to their eighteenth birthday. …

Was Phil Hanna an angel of mercy or just another cog in the machinery of state-sponsored death? — ON DECEMBER 5, 1896, a wealthy 22-year-old Epworth, Illinois farmer and landowner named G. Phil Hanna witnessed the hanging of Fred Behme, who had been convicted and sentenced to die in McLeansboro for the murders of his wife and infant son. Hanna claimed to have been “mortified” by the “brutal…