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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Botched Hanging Of William Williams: How Too Much Rope And Minnesota’S Newspapers Brought An End To The Death Penalty In Minnesota, John Bessler Mar 2004

The Botched Hanging Of William Williams: How Too Much Rope And Minnesota’S Newspapers Brought An End To The Death Penalty In Minnesota, John Bessler

All Faculty Scholarship

This article describes Minnesota's last state-sanctioned execution: that of William Williams, who was hanged in 1906 in the basement of the Ramsey County Jail. Convicted of killing a teenage boy, Williams was tried on murder charges in 1905 and was put to death in February of the following year. Because the county sheriff miscalculated the length of the rope, the hanging was botched, with Williams hitting the floor when the trap door was opened. Three deputies, standing on the scaffold, thereafter seized the rope and forcibly pulled it up until Williams - fourteen and half minutes later - died by …


The Dilution Effect: Federalization, Fair Cross-Sections, And The Concept Of Community, Laura Gaston Dooley Jan 2004

The Dilution Effect: Federalization, Fair Cross-Sections, And The Concept Of Community, Laura Gaston Dooley

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Ambivalence About Treason, George P. Fletcher Jan 2004

Ambivalence About Treason, George P. Fletcher

Faculty Scholarship

Betrayal and disloyalty are grievous moral wrongs, yet today when the disloyal commit treason we seem reluctant to punish them. John Walker Lindh fought for the Taliban with full knowledge that it was engaged in hostilities against the United States. It should not have been so difficult to prove by two witnesses to the overt act, as the Constitution requires, that he adhered to the enemy giving them aid and comfort. Admittedly, there were legal problems about whether the Taliban as an indirect enemy in an undeclared war could qualify as the enemy in the constitutional sense. But there was …