Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina by Seth Kotch (review)

Race is at the heart of Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina, Seth Kotch’s history of capital punishment in North Carolina from the colonial period to the present. The death penalty in North Carolina, he argues, has always served the interests of white supremacy. Elite whites used it to instill fear into enslaved people in the antebellum period, to demonstrate the state’s commitment to Jim Crow in the postemancipation age of lynching, and to disproportionately punish those convicted of murdering white people in the modern era.

Kotch covers everything from technological transformations in the “machinery of death” to the failure of the state’s abolitionist activists to end capital punishment (p. 5). Lethal State is most notable for its contribution to scholars’ understanding of the relationship between lynching and capital punishment. Writing against a social science literature that has often overlooked the meaning of these forms of violence in a quest to discern the relationship between them, Kotch successfully argues that the two practices were “complementary forms of social control” (p. 18). Both “were mimetic methods of racial subjugation that North Carolinians at the time saw as in conversation with one another” (p. 18). Lynching eventually declined, not because white anxiety about race subsided, but because the state successfully incorporated it into the bureaucratic administration of death. North Carolina developed a “profoundly biased yet aspirationally modern” death penalty, one that embodied, Kotch notes, historian David M. Potter’s characterization of the New South as a region that “‘could not bear either to abandon the traditions of the Old South or to forego the material gains of modern America’” (p. 82).

Given the racist demand for lethal punishment in the early twentieth century, it seems odd that state actors would move executions into the bowels of the state’s penitentiaries in 1910. Such a move risked alienating whites anxious for violent public demonstrations of white supremacy. Kotch, however, shows that racist newspaper coverage of executions compensated for the public’s loss of access to them. Satisfying the punitive desires of its white readers, for instance, the Raleigh News and Observer called Andrew Jackson—who was executed in 1920—“‘a great, stupid, unlettered animal’” and informed readers that after the man’s execution in the state’s electric chair, his “‘body was trundled away to do its first service to society in the hands of medical students’” (p. 79).

One stone remains unturned in Kotch’s survey of the historical landscape of capital punishment in North Carolina. In Furman v. Georgia (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state courts were imposing the death penalty in an unconstitutionally arbitrary manner. In an effort to appease the state and federal courts, the North Carolina legislature tried to solve the problem by making the death penalty mandatory for everyone convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated rape. Given the state’s checkered history with a mandatory death penalty, though, such a decision is perplexing. Until the 1940s, the death penalty had been mandatory for those convicted of capital crimes. Such rigidity had unintended consequences, like compassionate juries who acquitted guilty defendants to avoid sentencing them to death. Given that experience, why did state legislators not embrace the approach of other southern states like Georgia—an approach ultimately approved by the Supreme Court—that balanced sentencing guidelines with the opportunity to grant mercy? Kotch’s conjecture—that legislators thought a mandatory death penalty was the only way to satisfy the courts—is plausible, but more work is needed to understand how and why a state with a reputation for moderation among its southern counterparts opted for a draconian sentencing scheme that the Supreme Court found unpalatable in Woodson v. North Carolina (1976).

This quibble is ultimately a small one...