In her book, ​“Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South,” University of Memphis pro­fes­sor Margaret Vandiver explores the com­plex rela­tion­ship between these two forms of pun­ish­ment and chal­lenges the assump­tion that exe­cu­tions con­sis­tent­ly grew out of — and replaced — lynch­ings. Vandiver’s book exam­ines lynch­ings and legal exe­cu­tions in three cul­tur­al­ly and geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­tinct south­ern regions. First she researched rur­al north­west Tennessee, where lynch­ings out­num­bered exe­cu­tions by 11 to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offens­es rather than for actu­al crimes. Then she exam­ined Shelby County, Tennessee, includ­ing the city of Memphis, where more men were legal­ly exe­cut­ed than lynched. Last, she researched Marion County, Florida, where she dis­cov­ered a firm­ly entrenched tra­di­tion of lynch­ing for sex­u­al assault that end­ed in the 1930s with three legal death sen­tences in quick suc­ces­sion. Based on her find­ings, Vandiver writes about the ways that legal and extrale­gal process­es imi­tat­ed, influ­enced, and dif­fered from each oth­er in these regions. Then, using a series of case stud­ies, she iden­ti­fies par­al­lels between the mock tri­als that were held by lynch mobs and the legal tri­als that were rushed through the courts and fol­lowed by quick exe­cu­tions. Although the empha­sis is on the his­tor­i­cal use of these prac­tices, the author argues that mod­ern death sen­tences, like lynch­ings of the past, con­tin­ue to be influ­enced by fac­tors of race and place, and that death sen­tenc­ing is com­pa­ra­bly errat­ic. (Rutgers University Press, 2006). See Books.

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