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A Hanging in Detroit: Stephen Gifford Simmons and the Last Execution under Michigan Law (Great Lakes Books Series)

Amazon.com Price:  $26.94 (as of 02/05/2019 15:36 PST- Details)

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Description

On September 24, 1830, Stephen G. Simmons, a fifty-year-old tavern keeper and farmer, used to be hanged in Detroit for murdering his wife, Levana Simmons, in a drunken, jealous rage. Michigan executed only two people all over the fifty-year period, from 1796 to 1846, when the death penalty used to be legal within its boundaries. Simmons used to be the second one and last person to be executed under Michigan law. In A Hanging in Detroit David G. Chardavoyne vividly evokes not only the crime, trial, and execution of Simmons, but also the setting and players of the drama, social and legal customs of the times, and the controversy that arose as a result of the affair. Chardavoyne illuminates his account of this necessary moment in Michigan’s history with many little-known facts, creating a study that may be at once an engrossing story and the first historical examination of the event that helped bring in regards to the abolition of the death penalty in Michigan.

Simmons execution came at a time when Michigan had begun to change from a sparsely populated wilderness to a thriving agricultural center, and Detroit from a small military outpost to a metropolis founded on trade, manufacturing, and an influx of immigrants and other settlers. The hanging used to be a defining moment all over this period of dramatic social change. Thousands of spectators crowded into Detroit expecting to see a thrilling public execution. Many of those spectators, alternatively, left deeply disturbed by the spectacle they had witnessed. Chardavoyne, a lawyer, probes the unsettling incident which sparked a profound shift in attitudes toward capital punishment in Michigan, examining along the best way such mysteries as why Simmons used to be hanged for his crime when other up to date killers were hardly punished at all. A Hanging in Detroit will fascinate legal historians and lay readers alike with its incisive look into Great Lakes regional history and crime and punishment in Michigan.

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