Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House

Introduction

Introduction From 1891 to 1963, 606 men and eight women were legally executed in the electric chair at New York’s infamous Sing Sing Prison—more than at any other American prison. The capital punishment systems and procedures that were developed at Sing Sing established the prototype for modern legal prison-based executions, and the resulting media coverage helped shape public perceptions of crime and punishment, good and evil, and gangsters versus guardians of public safety. For millions of persons around the world, the Sing Sing Death House was capital punishment. Some of Sing Sing’s higher-profile cases received sensational coverage by reporters from newspapers, pulp magazines, radio, and newsreels, spawning more than a dozen major Hollywood movies that imprinted chilling images of the chair, the last mile, and other macabre conventions onto the minds of generations of Americans. The place was so famous that a letter mailed from abroad and addressed simply to “Sing Sing, U.S.A.” was likely to find its way into the warden’s hands. Already a household word a half century before the electric chair came on the scene, Sing Sing became the most famous prison in the world. And yet, despite all the attention it received over the decades, Sing Sing’s death house was one of the most closed, secret, and mythologized places in America—a closely guarded and rigidly ruled inner sanctum that operated beyond the bounds of public scrutiny or humankind, and a killing machine that ran seemingly on its own power and volition and according to its own irrevocable rules. Every facet of life inside was controlled and prescribed by the prison authorities. Outsiders were strictly forbidden to enter without a court order; even an FBI agent or top law-enforcement officer required official approval to get inside, and those wishing to witness an execution were thoroughly screened and allowed to attend only if they carried an official invitation. Information was tightly controlled. Reports about the prison behavior and character of condemned convicts were left to journalists and scriptwriters to construct as they saw fit, with all the limits and imperatives of a morality play. Long after the executions stopped, evidence of what had really happened inside the forbidding walls remained buried in bulging internal files or had vanished into eternity. On April 8, 1977, however, as part of an excavation of prison history and after months of official wrangling, a staff archivist from the State Department of Education was authorized to take custody of some dusty old official records stored at the Ossining Correctional Facility (Sing Sing) in Westchester County, about seventy miles north of New York City. Some of the boxes contained records relating to the death house. This removal of the cardboard boxes in 1977 marked the first time that behind-the-scenes documentation of the executions at Sing Sing had ever been allowed outside the prison walls. By then, the death penalty itself seemed a relic of the past; the last execution at the facility had taken place in 1963, and restoration of capital punishment in New York seemed unlikely. At most, the records seemed a fitting subject for eventual study by historians , but they did not appear to have much current legal or political value. For several years the prison records remained in official custody, closed to all but a few viewers. Finally, after years of cleaning, review, cataloging, and accessioning, a collection of some of the records was made available to authorized researchers at the New York State Archives in Albany. The materials from the death house included copies of two receiving blotters for the period 1891–1946, a log of legal actions involving condemned prisoners covering the period 1915–1967, assorted other prison logs, and a selection of 153 inmate case files spanning the period 1939–1963. The Department of Correctional Services still has not turned over to the archives the records for the bulk of the inmates who passed through the death house during its more than 79-year history , and fragments of some of the files occasionally turn up in the hands of private collectors or are discovered in library holdings. Despite its limitations and gaps, the archival collection offers a revealing look into the internal administration of capital punishment as it actually existed, not just as it was constructed by image makers or recounted by self-serving survivors. The case records cover part of the Great Depression, World War II, some...