Civil War, the number of
had grown, wrecking the relative peace of the five civilized tribes that
Indian Territory. By the time Parker arrived at
Fort Smith, Indian Territory had become known as a
very bad place, where
thought the laws did not apply to them and terror reigned.
Replacing Judge William Story, whose tenure had been marred
by corruption, Parker arrived in
Fort Smith on May 4, 1875. At the age of 36, Judge Parker
was the youngest Federal judge in the West.
Holding court for the first time on May 10, 1875, eight men were found
guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
Judge Parker held
court six days a week, often up to ten hours each day and tried 91 defendants in his first
eight weeks on the bench. In that first summer, eighteen persons
came before him charged with murder and 15 were convicted. Eight of them
were sentenced to die on the gallows on September 3, 1875. However, only
six would be executed as one was killed trying to escape and a second had
his sentence commuted to life in prison because of his youth.
When the fateful day of September 3, 1875 arrived
the hanging became
an extraordinary media event when reporters from Little Rock,
Louis and Kansas City flocked to the city. Other newspapermen traveled
far from eastern and northern cities to catch the "scoop.” Beginning a week before the hanging, the city began to fill with
strangers from all over the country, anxious to view the hangings. On the day they were to be condemned more than 5,000 people
watched as the six men were marched from the jail to the gallows.
The Fort Smith
Independent was the first newspaper to report the event on
September 3, 1875 with the large column heading reading: "Execution
Day!!" Other newspapers around the country reported the event a day
later. These press reports shocked people throughout the nation. "Cool
Destruction of Six Human Lives by Legal Process" screamed the
Of the six
felons, three were white, two were
Native American and one was black.
Seated along the back of the gallows, their death warrants were
read to them and each was asked if they had any last words.
preliminaries were over, the six were lined up on the scaffold while
Maledon adjusted the nooses around
their necks. The trap was sprung all six died at once at the end of
Though the hangings
were an indication that the once corrupt court was functioning again,
critics dubbed him the "Hanging Judge" and called his court the "Court
of the Damned." However, most of Parker's critics didn’t
live in the frontier and did not understand the ethics (or lack
thereof) of the untamed Indian Territory. Most of the local
people approved of Parker's judgments,
feeling like the utter viciousness of the crimes merited the sentences
imposed. From these first 6 hangings in 1875, there would be 73 more
until his death in 1896.
Though Parker was hard on killers and
rapists, he was also a fair man. He occasionally granted retrials
that sometimes resulted in acquittals or reduced sentences. Though Parker actually favored the
abolition of the death penalty, he strictly adhered to the letter of the
law. At one time he said, "in the uncertainty of punishment
following crime, lies the weakness of our halting justice." However,
Parker reserved most of his
sympathy for the crime victims and is now seen as one of first advocates
of victim's rights.
jurisdiction began to shrink as more courts were given authority over
parts of Indian Territory. The restrictions of the court's once vast jurisdiction were sometimes a
source of frustration to Parker,
but what bothered him the most were the Supreme Court reversals of capital
crimes tried in Fort Smith.
Fully two-thirds of the cases appealed to the higher court were reversed
and sent back to Fort Smith
for new trials. In 1894 the judge gained national attention in a dispute
with the Supreme Court over the case of Lafayette Hudson.
In 1895 a new Courts Act
was passed which would remove the last remaining Indian Territory
jurisdiction effective September 1, 1896. Following the escape attempt of
Bill in the
summer of 1895, which resulted in the death of a jail guard, Judge Parker
again came into conflict with his superior when he blamed the Justice
Department and the Supreme court for the incident.
eventually hanged in Fort Smith
on March 17, 1896. But the debate was not yet over and a very public
argument was carried on between Judge Parker
and the Assistant Attorney General.
When the August 1896 term
began, Judge Parker
was at home, too sick to preside over the court. Twenty years of overwork
had contributed to a variety of ailments, including Bright's Disease. When
the jurisdiction of the court over lands in the Indian Territory
came to an end on September 1, 1896, the Judge had to be interviewed by
reporters at his bedside. Scarcely two months after the jurisdictional
change took effect, the Judge died on November 17, 1896.
In 21 years on the
bench, Judge Parker tried 13,490 cases, 344 of which were capital crimes. 9,454
cases resulted in guilty pleas or convictions. Over the years, Judge
Parker sentenced 160 men to death by hanging, though only 79 of them
were actually hanged. The rest died in jail, appealed or were
of America, updated December, 2012.