Odd Wisconsin Archive
Death to Capital Punishment
Wisconsin is one of only 12 U.S. states that prohibit the death penalty. Our last execution took place more than 150 years ago, when John McCaffary was hung in Kenosha for drowning his wife in the summer of 1850. The restraints that bound his arms and legs that day ultimately came to the Society's Museum collection as documentation of the last public execution in Wisconsin.
It was a particularly gruesome hanging, made more unsavory by the fact that the thousands of specators who came to watch included some of the state's leading citizens and elected officials. Kenosha Editor Christopher L. Sholes (who also invented the typewriter) was appalled, and he mobilized support to outlaw capital punishment. Sholes was elected to the Assembly a few months after the McCaffary hanging and succeeded in pushing through the legislature the provision that ultimately banned the death penalty in Wisconsin. Here is his March 5, 1852, speech that persuaded the Assembly to bar any further executions.
Today the majority of nations prohibit capital punishment by law or in practice. Of those that retain it, only 4 - - the U.S., China, Iran and Vietnam - - conducted 94% of the last year's executions. Wisconsin's opposition to capital punishment may be unusual in the U.S., but it is in line with the views of most European and industrialized countries.
:: Posted in Strange Deaths on August 12, 2005
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