An article that ranks executions by how deserved they were has to be right about every case on the list. This one is a useful demonstration of why, because its third entry is a woman whose conviction rested on testimony her own brother later admitted he invented.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, for conspiracy to commit espionage. Judge Irving Kaufman, sentencing them, said he held them responsible not only for the espionage but for the dead of the Korean War. Picasso, Einstein and the Pope asked Eisenhower to stop it. He did not.
The chief witnesses were Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, who had worked at Los Alamos, and his wife Ruth. The case against Ethel came down to a single act: David testified that she had typed his handwritten notes for Julius to pass on. That typing is what made her a participant rather than a wife who knew.
In 2001, on television, David Greenglass said he had lied about it. Ruth had done the typing. He had put it on his sister to keep his wife out of prison, and the arrangement worked; Ruth was never charged, and David served nine and a half years and was out in 1960. His grand jury testimony, released decades later, makes no mention of Ethel typing anything. Ruth’s grand jury testimony contradicts what she said at the trial.
The Venona decrypts, declassified in 1995, are the strongest evidence that Julius was a Soviet agent. They are also the strongest evidence that Ethel was not. The KGB gave its operatives code names. Julius had one. Ethel never did, and appears in the traffic only in relation to her husband.
Their sons have spent fifty years on this and have arrived somewhere more precise than either side of the old argument: they accept that their father was guilty of the conspiracy he was charged with, and they say their mother was not, and that neither should have been put to death.
So a list of the most deserved executions in modern history opens its third entry with a case that a substantial body of released evidence says was a wrongful execution. Not a contested conviction. An execution.
That is not a small error inside an otherwise sound piece. It is what the format does.
The other entries are mostly the cases nobody argues about, and it is worth saying plainly that they are not in doubt. Albert Fish was a child murderer who cannibalised his victims and who welcomed the electric chair. Carl Panzram confessed to twenty-one murders that nobody had connected to him, wrote to President Hoover to make sure his hanging was not delayed, and told the men campaigning to save him that he wished they had one neck between them. John Wayne Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders, twenty-six of them buried in the crawl space under his own house. Timothy McVeigh killed a hundred and sixty-eight people including children in a daycare centre. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was the most senior surviving officer of the Nazi security apparatus and was hanged at Nuremberg.
Nothing in the record disturbs any of those. The trouble is that the list does not distinguish between them and the Rosenbergs, because its organising idea, desert, does not have a factual test attached to it. Guilt has one. Desert is a judgement made afterwards about how much punishment a proven crime warrants, and the moment it becomes the criterion, the question of whether the crime was proved stops being the thing under examination.
There is a second Rosenberg on the list, which is its own kind of evidence about how carefully it was assembled. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologist, was hanged at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946, hours after Kaltenbrunner. He is a different person from Julius and Ethel, unrelated to them, and the article places him five entries later without noting that the surname has come round twice.
The first entry undermines the premise from the other direction. Allen Lee Davis was executed in Florida in July 1999 for the murder of Nancy Weiler, who was pregnant, and her two daughters, aged nine and five. Nothing about his guilt is in question. What happened in the chair is: he bled heavily from the nose and was burned on the head, leg and groin, and a justice of the Florida Supreme Court published the photographs in order to argue that the electric chair had to go. It did. Davis was the last man Florida electrocuted, and the state moved to lethal injection the following year.
An article about executions people deserved thus opens with an execution that a sitting judge used as evidence that the method was indefensible. Both things are true at once, and the list has no room for that, because it is sorted by whether the man had it coming.
Saddam Hussein sits near the end, hanged on December 30, 2006 for the killing of a hundred and forty-eight Shia men and boys from Dujail in 1982, one charge out of a great many that were never tried, in a court established under an occupation, with his co-defendants executed separately a fortnight later. Whatever one concludes about the sentence, the proceeding was not a settled matter even at the time.
The honest version of this list is a much duller sentence. There are cases in which guilt is not disputed and the crimes are as bad as crimes get, and reasonable people still disagree about the death penalty. That disagreement is not resolved by putting Albert Fish and Ethel Rosenberg in the same column.
Ethel Rosenberg was thirty-seven. She left two sons, aged six and ten. The prosecution's own case against her was a typewriter, and the man who put it there said, half a century later, that he had made it up.