After hearing the news about a televised execution by firing squad from the defense secretary, I was disgusted. I then wanted to gauge public opinion during the era when America still conducted public executions.

I went back to the 1700s through the 1930s, when the last public execution was reported to have taken place.

Here’s some of what I found.

A botched firing squad execution in 1879 led to a man bleeding out for nearly 30 minutes.

In 1879, The Silver Reef Miner reported on Wallace Wilkerson, a man sentenced to death in Utah for the murder of William Baxter.

Of his options, Wilkerson chose the firing squad over hanging or decapitation.

When his final moments arrived, he was seated in a chair, unblindfolded. Seconds after the shots were fired, he leaped forward exclaiming,

“Oh, my God, they have missed the mark!”

He then fell face forward onto the ground where he laid for nearly 30 minutes before succumbing to his injuries.

Pennsylvania sought to abolish the death penalty in 1844.

By the mid-19th century, backing for public executions was fading, and in several states, the death penalty itself faced growing opposition. 

Pennsylvania was among those states, and just 10 years after ending public displays of capital punishment, its House of Representatives introduced a bill to end the practice entirely.

Once the state stopped holding executions in public, the Public Ledger, and Daily Transcript argued, people recovered from the excitement and curiosity that had clouded their judgment. Thinking more calmly, they began to question whether it was right to treat a human being like an animal, and concluded that even the most hardened criminals deserved some measure of mercy.

“While executions were public, the masses seemed so infatuated with the exhibition, as to be incapable of examining into its results, and although it was notorious that the example furnished by the death of a culprit had little or no effect in deterring others from the commission of crime, and although offences of almost every kind were perpetrated in the very shadow of the gallows, many were disposed to adhere to the barbarous practice, and even contended that it was necessary to the safety of society.”

Ultimately, the bill didn’t pass and while the death penalty is still legal in Pennsylvania today, it’s had a moratorium on executions since 1999. 

An 1894 Indiana article portrayed public executions as a burning disgrace, ranging from repulsive public displays to children “playing hang.”

The Fort Wayne Weekly Sentinel didn’t hold back in its 1895 editorial “Public Hangings,” writing that crowds treated public hangings like social outings, with one recent execution at the time having drawn 5,000 spectators.

And the repercussions of publicizing executions went far beyond gruesome spectacles. 

“Anything more ghastly, more awfully repulsive to every finer sentiment of human nature cannot be imagined. If some of those boys go and play at hanging their playmates, if later they themselves become murderers and swing from the gallows, it need not surprise their parents and the authorities who permitted spectators at the execntion, It is no credit to American civilization that hangings aro still permitted to take place in public.”

Author Charles Dickens was among those who opposed public capital punishment.

The author of legendary books such as Oliver Twist, a Christmas Carol or David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, was a vocal dissenter of public executions. 

“First That they chiefly attract as spectators, the most depraved of mankind, in whom they inspire no wholesome emotions whatever,” Dickens wrote. “Secondly, That the public infliction of a violent death is not a salutary spectacle for any class of people; but that it is, in the nature of things, that on the class by whom it is generally witnessed, it should have a debasing and hardening influence.”