Raymond Hamilton was twenty-one years old when he was executed in Huntsville on May 10, 1935. In the three years before that he was convicted of murder twice in Texas courts. In 1933 he received a life sentence for murder. In 1934 he was sentenced to death for murder in the case that followed a January escape from a Texas prison farm, during which Major J. Crowson received the injuries from which he died eleven days later. A fellow inmate, Joe Palmer, was convicted of causing that death; Hamilton was tried as a party to it and, as a repeat offender, was given the same sentence.
Hamilton had spent part of late 1932 travelling with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, both of whom died before any trial. His record is longer than the two murder cases. He was serving sentences that totalled 266 years when he left prison in January 1934, and a plea of guilty to a bank offense at Lewisville that spring added 99 years more.
Hamilton was born on May 21, 1913, in Oklahoma. He grew up in Dallas, where as a teenager he met Clyde Barrow. That makes him 21 at his execution, eleven days short of his twenty-second birthday.
In late 1932 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow began travelling with him, and he left them several months later.
An appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, numbered 16396, in the name of Raymond Hamilton, was dismissed on October 11, 1933, at his own request. The offense was murder. The opinion records an affidavit in which he asked that the appeal be withdrawn and gives the sentence as "confinement in the penitentiary for life." By the end of 1933 Hamilton was in the Texas prison system. The 266-year total covered convictions for auto theft, robbery and murder.
On January 16, 1934, Clyde Barrow freed five prisoners from a Texas prison farm, with Bonnie Parker present. Hamilton was among them, serving sentences that totalled more than 200 years.
Major J. Crowson died on January 27, 1934.
Palmer was tried in Grimes County, after the case was moved from Walker County. The jury gave him a death sentence and the judgment was entered on June 27, 1934. The court noted that the indictment relied on a 1929 robbery conviction from Limestone County to raise the penalty, and held that this was properly alleged.
Hamilton was not the person identified as causing Crowson's death. He was sentenced on the ground that he carried the same responsibility under the law as the man who did.
Hamilton and another man were taken into custody on April 25, 1934, in Grayson County, after an offense at the First National Bank of Lewisville, in Denton County, the same day.
He pleaded guilty to the Lewisville offense and received 99 years.
Between his custody on April 25 and July 22, 1934, Hamilton was tried for murder and sentenced to death. He was tried as a habitual criminal, and under the law of parties he shared responsibility for Crowson's death. The Court of Criminal Appeals recorded the offense as murder and the sentence as death.
On July 22, 1934, while that appeal was pending, Hamilton left his death cell at Huntsville together with Palmer and a third inmate. Minutes of a special meeting of the Texas Prison Board two days later record that all three were gone. On October 10, 1934, the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed his appeal, No. 17227, on a warden's affidavit that he had escaped and had not returned or been recaptured, and that the court's jurisdiction was therefore ousted under a rule amended in 1933. The court did not review the trial. The same court that day affirmed Palmer's conviction, as Palmer had been recaptured, in Kentucky, on August 12, 1934.
Hamilton was recaptured at Fort Worth on April 5, 1935. On May 10, 1935, the Court of Criminal Appeals refused to accept a habeas corpus petition filed on his behalf, and shortly afterward the governor announced that he would not intervene in the executions of Hamilton and Palmer. Hamilton was executed in Huntsville on May 10, 1935, after Palmer, at the age of 21.
The 1934 appeal decision turned on a rule of procedure that Texas had amended in 1933. Under it, a convicted person who escaped while an appeal was pending lost the right to have the appeal heard unless he returned within a set period. Palmer's appeal was heard because his recapture came within that period; Hamilton's was not, because he remained at large when the court acted. As a result the death sentence given to Hamilton was never tested on appeal, and the court's account of the events at the prison farm comes from Palmer's case.
Neither verdict was reviewed on its merits: Hamilton withdrew his 1933 appeal, and his 1934 appeal was dismissed after his escape. The trial court, county and victim of the 1933 conviction, and the court and county of the 1934 death-sentence trial, are not on record. The death sentence rested on his responsibility as a party; the court that reviewed the events found that Palmer caused Crowson's death.
Late 1932: Hamilton travels for some months with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.
1933: life sentence for murder.
October 11, 1933: Court of Criminal Appeals dismisses his appeal at his own request.
January 16, 1934: escape from a Texas prison farm; Major J. Crowson dies January 27, 1934.
April 25, 1934: Lewisville offense; Hamilton taken into custody in Grayson County; pleads guilty and receives 99 years.
June 27, 1934: judgment entered against Joe Palmer in Grimes County.
July 22, 1934: Hamilton leaves a death cell at Huntsville.
October 10, 1934: Court of Criminal Appeals dismisses Hamilton's appeal No. 17227 and affirms Palmer's conviction.
April 5, 1935: Hamilton recaptured at Fort Worth.
May 10, 1935: executed in Huntsville.