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265 Chapter 13 The Death Penalty in the Pacific Northwest Joseph Laythe Introduction T he Pacific Northwest—Oregon and Washington—has historically been a safe place for its white residents. The region was abundant in resources that could be easily tapped by the whites who sought to settle there. The region afforded its citizens, according to ­ historian Gordon Dodds, a “pleasant, undemanding life.” That ease of life, however, had two important implications for the region. First, it meant that those individuals enjoying the region’s plentiful offerings would, on occasion, have to defend their territory, their prosperity, and their power from perceived outside threats. There were many tools and techniques used to accomplish that defense, among them the use of capital punishment. The death penalty was used in the Pacific Northwest in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s as a means of pacifying the region’s original inhabitants. By the end of the nineteenth century, Native Americans were effectively removed as “obstacles to progress” and threats to social order, and so the use of the death penalty diminished. Washington and Oregon renewed their use of the death penalty when new perceived threats to social order emerged. This occurred in the 1880s and 1890s with the growing presence of Chinese and the economic setbacks of those eras, in the 1910s and 1920s with the threat of radical labor, and in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s because of a changing population and culture. In periods of peace and prosperity, however, northwesterners spent their lives in blissful isolation . The isolation, prosperity, and absence of socioeconomic and cultural conflict allowed the citizens of the region to engage in “careful civic and economic experimentation.” That experimentation included the right to public initiative and legislative referendum. In short, Oregon and Washington citizens empowered their state legislatures with the right to refer important issues to a direct public vote. Likewise, they gave themselves the power to introduce legislation. This initiative and referendum system made the controversy of capital punishment a public issue. And, as a result, nowhere in the United States has the public voted more times on the subject than in the Pacific Northwest. The civic experimentation of the Pacific Northwest can thus be seen in the periodic abolition of the death penalty in the 1910s and again in the 1960s. 266 Joseph Laythe The Oregon Country and the Institution of Laws Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, much of the Pacific Northwest was called the “Oregon Country.” This area encompassed what is now modern-day Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, and part of Montana. Between 1818 and 1846, the area was contested terrain between Britain and the United States. In the 1830s and 1840s, the tide of overlanders into the area, spurred on by “Oregon Fever,” enabled the United States to secure sole ownership of the region. That influx of settlers, however , did not come without costs. The new settlers wanted reassurance of a stable society and, as a result, sought the establishment of new laws for their region. They did not have to reinvent their laws, however. Instead, they simply transplanted the laws from their home states to the new territory . On July 5, 1843, for example, the Legislative Committee of the Provisional Government accepted a motion to adopt the laws of the Iowa Territory. In the years following, lawmakers and jurists in Oregon tweaked those laws to accommodate the unique circumstances that the region afforded and adjusted the laws to insure the constitutionality of their criminal procedures. In 1850, the transplantation phenomenon was furthered when Oregon adopted the Pennsylvaniastyle statute of dividing murder into first-degree and second-degree charges.1 By this point in time, the region had adopted the practice of capital punishment. Between 1850 and 1859, when Oregon achieved statehood, the territory’s federal courts were impaired by “erratic attendance and failure to act in a responsible manner.”2 Two decades of settlement and legal establishment had done little to stabilize the region and provide a blanket of equal justice to the people of the Pacific Northwest. The arbitrary justice applied in the Oregon Country can best be seen in the Cayuse Trial of 1850. In November 1847, at a place called Waillatpu, not far from modern-day Walla Walla, Washington , Cayuse Indians attacked and massacred the inhabitants of the Whitman Mission, including Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. Over the course of the next two years, an army of whites from the Willamette Valley hunted down the...

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