Robert Stroud was convicted of two killings, the first in Juneau, Alaska, in January 1909 and the second at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, in March 1916. For the first he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in August 1909 and received a sentence of 12 years. For the second, the killing of a guard named Andrew F. Turner, he was tried three times in the US District Court for the District of Kansas and finally sentenced to death. The US Supreme Court affirmed that sentence in November 1919, in Stroud v. United States, 251 U.S. 15. On April 15, 1920, President Woodrow Wilson commuted it to life imprisonment, and Stroud remained in federal custody until his death in Missouri on November 21, 1963.
He is remembered for what he did with the decades that followed. In isolation at Leavenworth he raised canaries and other birds and studied their diseases, and two books on the subject, Diseases of Canaries (1933) and Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds (1943), carried his name into print.
Stroud was born in 1890 in Washington state. By 1909 he was living in Juneau, Alaska, aged 18.
On January 18, 1909, Stroud killed a man in Juneau. He was charged with murder in the first degree. He first entered a plea of not guilty and later pleaded guilty to the lesser offense of manslaughter. On August 23, 1909, he was sentenced to 12 years in a federal penitentiary, and a few days later he left Juneau by steamship to begin the sentence in a federal penitentiary in Washington state.
The sentence placed Stroud in the federal system at 19. It also set the terms of everything that followed, because the 1916 offense was committed by a man already serving a term for homicide.
In 1912 Stroud was moved from the penitentiary in Washington state to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, after an incident with another inmate. At Leavenworth he took university extension courses.
On March 26, 1916, Stroud killed Andrew F. Turner, a guard at the Leavenworth penitentiary. The offense took place inside the penitentiary, where Stroud was serving the Alaska sentence. He was indicted for murder in the first degree in the US District Court for the District of Kansas.
The first trial took place in May 1916. Stroud was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death. The Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judgment, reported at 245 Fed. 990, after the United States attorney confessed error. A confession of error is the prosecution's own admission that the trial court made a mistake, and in this case it removed the first verdict.
The second trial took place in May 1917. The jury found Stroud guilty "without capital punishment," and the court imposed life imprisonment. Stroud took the case to the Supreme Court on a writ of error, and the Solicitor General again confessed error. The Supreme Court reversed the second judgment.
The District Court then vacated the earlier sentence and ordered a new trial. At the third trial, in 1918, the jury found Stroud guilty of murder in the first degree without a recommendation dispensing with capital punishment, and the court sentenced him to death. A newspaper item of the period noted that Kansas had abolished its own death penalty in 1907 and that Stroud was convicted in federal court for an offense inside the penitentiary.
Stroud brought the third conviction to the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. The Court heard argument on October 22, 1919, and decided the case on November 24, 1919. The judgment was affirmed.
The Court dealt with the challenges in turn. On double jeopardy under the Fifth Amendment, it held that a verdict of guilty as charged is a conviction for murder in the first degree even when the jury adds the words "without capital punishment," and that because Stroud himself had obtained the earlier reversals, the new trial did not place him in second jeopardy within the meaning of the Constitution. On the request to move the trial and to quash the jury panel, it held that these were matters for the trial court's discretion and found no abuse of that discretion; Leavenworth County residents had been excluded from the jury. On the challenge of a juror for cause, it held that any error was not prejudicial, because Stroud removed the juror with a peremptory challenge, had been allowed more peremptory challenges than the statute required, and had shown no objectionable juror on the panel that sat. On the letters Stroud had written while imprisoned, which went to the warden and from him to the prosecutor, it held that there was "neither testimony required of the accused nor unreasonable search and seizure." The Court concluded that it was "unable to find that any error was committed to the prejudice of the accused."
A petition for rehearing was denied on January 19, 1920, in a short memorandum opinion that returned to the juror challenge and to the number of peremptory challenges shown on the record.
After the Supreme Court's decision, Stroud's mother appealed to President Wilson. On April 15, 1920, Wilson commuted the sentence of death to life imprisonment, and Stroud was held in solitary confinement. Later petitions for clemency, filed with the Office of the Pardon Attorney, did not succeed.
Stroud's work with birds began at Leavenworth, around 1920, with a nest of sparrows and then canaries. Over the following years he raised them in quantity, studied the diseases that killed them and the methods that bred them, and wrote about both. Much of the work was done in isolation, and some of his manuscripts were smuggled out of the penitentiary and published. Diseases of Canaries appeared in 1933 and Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds in 1943, the second of which became an important work in the field.
In 1942 Stroud was transferred from Kansas to a federal prison in California, where he served 17 years. Six of those years were spent in segregation. He could continue some research there but was denied permission to publish. He wrote a history of the federal prison system of about 2,000 pages, which the Bureau of Prisons refused to release to a publisher. In 1959 he was moved to a federal prison medical center in Missouri.
In 1962 he brought a case in a federal court in Missouri to challenge the Bureau's refusal to let him publish. It had not been decided when he died.
Stroud died on November 21, 1963, in Missouri. He was 73. He had spent more than five decades in federal custody, from 1909 until his death, and he was never released.
Stroud's offense was committed inside a federal institution in Kansas, and he was tried in the US District Court for the District of Kansas, not in a state court. Kansas had abolished its own death penalty in 1907, so a death sentence there came only from the federal court. The case was tried three times because of two confessions of error, one by the government in the Circuit Court of Appeals and one by the Solicitor General in the Supreme Court. In both instances Stroud's own appeals produced the reversal, and the 1919 opinion treats that fact as the answer to his claim of double jeopardy. The verdict form that let a jury find a defendant guilty of first-degree murder "without capital punishment" is the source of the second trial's life sentence and of the Fifth Amendment question the Court decided.
The circumstances of the 1909 killing in Juneau were never tried: the case ended in a plea to manslaughter and a sentence of 12 years. His claims for the treatment of bird diseases rest on his own books.
1890: Robert Stroud born in Washington state.
January 18, 1909: Kills a man in Juneau, Alaska.
August 23, 1909: Pleads guilty to manslaughter; sentenced to 12 years in a federal penitentiary.
1912: Transferred to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.
March 26, 1916: Kills Andrew F. Turner, a guard at Leavenworth.
May 1916: First trial; murder in the first degree; sentenced to death; reversed on appeal.
May 1917: Second trial; verdict "without capital punishment"; reversed by the Supreme Court.
1918: Third trial; murder in the first degree; sentenced to death.
November 24, 1919: Supreme Court affirms (Stroud v. United States, 251 U.S. 15).
January 19, 1920: Rehearing denied (251 U.S. 380).
April 15, 1920: President Wilson commutes the sentence to life imprisonment.
1933: Diseases of Canaries published.
1942: Transferred to a federal prison in California.
1943: Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds published.
1959: Transferred to a federal medical center in Missouri.
November 21, 1963: Dies in Missouri.