From town squares to prison walls: A history of public executions in America

The Pentagon’s plan to livestream the Dec. 3 firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan revives a spectacle the country largely abandoned in the 1930s. From Jamestown in 1608 to a Kentucky riverfront in 1936, hangings drew crowds of thousands before states moved them behind prison walls.

[snip]

The crowds could be enormous. When John Tiernan was hanged for murder in Pittsburgh in 1818, a local newspaper put the crowd at eight to 10,000 people.

By the 1830s, officials were increasingly uneasy about the disorder such spectacles produced. In April 1834, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed an act abolishing public executions and moving hangings inside county jails. Pennsylvania is often cited as the first state to do so, though one scholar says Rhode Island banned them a year earlier.

[snip]

The final chapters came in the 1930s. On Aug. 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, for the rape of a 70-year-old white woman. Authorities charged him only with rape, Mother Jones reported, because a rape conviction allowed a public hanging in the county where the crime occurred. Estimates of the crowd run as high as 20,000.

[snip]

Bethea’s hanging is generally cited as the nation’s last public execution, though accounts differ. A 1996 West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly article describes a 1937 hanging in Galena, Missouri, that drew about 500 spectators and attributes the relatively small turnout to a high admission charge.

(*) Full article: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/oct/9/town-squares-prison-walls-history-public-executions-america/