Perspectives: Executions resume, but not in Minnesota

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The state of Florida conducted this year’s first execution of a convicted murderer last Tuesday, Feb. 10. The condemned man, Ronald Heath, was given a lethal injection for the 1989 robbery and murder of a traveling salesman in Gainesville, outside of the University of Florida.

With a long criminal record dating back to his teenage years, the murderer was one of 251 individuals, disproportionately poor, male, and of color, on death row in the Florida system. Another couple of convicted Florida murderers, one Black man and one white, are scheduled for the same fate over the next two weeks, in addition an execution scheduled last week in Oklahoma.

It’s fitting in a macabre way for the “Sunshine State,” the haven for many Minnesota expatriates and snowbirds, to lead the way in executions this year as it led the nation in them in 2025, racking up 19 of the 47 in the nation, 40% of the total, surpassing the usual leader, Texas.

At the federal level, there are no executions imminent as President Joe Biden, in one of his last acts in office last year, used his autopen to commute the death sentences of 37 of 40 condemned prisoners, leaving three still subject to capital punishment by the federal government if and when the Trump administration gets around to it, as the president has pledged it will.

Meanwhile, the death penalty is not available in Minnesota, one of 23 states that have banned it.

The demise of capital punishment in this state is traceable to two botchings: an infamous bank robbery in Northfield 150 years ago, and a flawed hanging in downtown St. Paul. 35 years later. That botching has been told before, but is worth recounting with the resumption of executions on the horizon. See Perspectives, “Prison closure conjures Cole and capital cases” in the June 2, 2025, edition of the Minnesota Lawyer.

“I support the death penalty… [as] a deterrent against future violence.”
President George W. Bush (1946 – )

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“[M]ore people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.”
First Lady Nancy Reagan (1921 – 2016)

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“I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.”
Comedian-Commentator Bill Maher (1956 – )

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“Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer.”
Social activist Rev. Jesse Jackson (1941 – )

Northfield nexus

The nexus to the abolition of capital punishment in Minnesota starts in Rice County a century and a half ago.

The notorious James-Younger gang, led by brothers Jesse and Frank James and including three Younger siblings, staged the celebrated “Northfield Raid,” an audacious daylight bank robbery on the main street of that prosperous college town on Sept. 7, 1876, a date still commemorated annually by that community’s “Jesse James Days” and relived in multiple publications from dime novels to criminal treatises and several movies.

The James-Younger robbery failed miserably, foiled by alert citizens. Five died in the incident: a courageous young teller at the First National Bank who rebuffed threats to open the locked vault; a citizen bystander; and three gang members. Jesse and Frank James managed to escape back to their stomping grounds in Missouri, while the Younger trio made their way through deeply-wooded terrain to near Medelia, Minnesota, where they were treated as celebrities until captured by a large posse about 80 miles southwest of the robbery site, with seven wounds inflicted on the siblings’ leader, Cole.

Jesse continued in his life of crime until he was shot in the back and killed five years later at his Missouri farmstead by a Confederate gang member planted there by law enforcement. Brother Frank went straight.

The Younger threesome went straight to jail, ultimately ending up in the Stillwater prison, which had opened for business in 1873 on the grounds of the prior Territorial edifice constructed 20 years earlier and receiving prisoners in 1854.

Capital curtailment

That’s when the events leading to the curtailment of capital punishment began.

The three Youngers almost certainly faced a death sentence for first-degree murder, although it wasn’t known for certain who actually pulled the fatal triggers. Cole, the oldest of the threesome, is believed to have been the one who shot and killed the Northfield bystander.

But all three pleaded guilty to murder. By doing so, they dodged the hangman’s noose because the law at that time reserved capital punishment to determination by juries. Their guilty pleas were reluctantly accepted by Judge Samuel Lord in Rice County District Court, who offered “no words of comfort” for the three brothers. They were then taken to the Stillwater prison to serve life terms imposed by the judge.

The outcome sparked an outcry with a bill passed by the state House of Representatives the following year to close that capital punishment loophole. But it died in the Senate until it was revived and enacted in 1883, six years after the Northfield Raid.

By pleading guilty, the Younger trio avoided hanging, a fate that befell at least 70 Minnesotans, dating back to the first executions in territorial days, along with a handful of lynchings and the mass execution of 38 Dakota tribal members in 1862 after the Dakota uprising.

That 1883 change in the law regarding capital punishment lasted for more than two decades until repealed 23 years later when the state eliminated that sanction.

The Youngers saga also prompted a constitutional amendment in 1896 establishing a three-member Board of Pardons to issue clemency in lieu of the prior unilateral authority vested with the governor. Composed of the governor, attorney general, and chief justice of the state Supreme Court, the issuance of clemency was deemed in the absence of explicit statutory language to require unanimity in Shefa v. Ellison, 968 N.W.2d 818 (Minn. 2022). But a year later, the Legislature changed the law to a majority decision, along with other procedural changes, like creation of an advisory Clemency Review Board. Minn. Stat. § 638.01.

Meanwhile, resigned to their fates, the Youngers were exemplary inmates, credited with starting The Mirror newspaper in 1887, which still functions as the nation’s oldest continuous prison publication.

Cole and Jim, the two surviving brothers after Bob died of tuberculosis while imprisoned, served out their terms and were paroled in 1901 after 25-year stints. Jim drifted into obscurity before committing suicide, but not Cole, who went on to a multifaceted business career, even teaming up for a while to run a Wild West carnival show like the more celebrated Buffalo Bill one, with none other than his old robbery colleague Frank James. Cole experienced a rarity for Wild West outlaws: He died of natural causes, a heart attack, in 1916 at age 72.

Legal leave

It was not until a decade after the two surviving Youngers left their not-so-friendly confines at the turn of the 20th century in Washington County that capital punishment took its legal leave, too. It had extended from territorial days until 1906, when a botched execution led to a constitutional controversy and ultimately the death penalty’s abolition in Minnesota in 1911.

Nearly two decades after enactment of the Younger-inspired death penalty law, a sensational case resulting in the execution of a woman for poisoning her husband led to legislation limiting capital punishment unless a jury specifically prescribed it.

The measure, which passed in 1868, effectively curtailed capital punishment until it was amended after the Younger brothers furor in 1883 to mandate capital punishment for first-degree murder cases unless “exceptional circumstances” justified a life sentence, which would be decided by trial judges rather than juries.

The controversy over public executions led to new legislation in 1889, known for its author, the “John Day Smith Law.” The law restricted public access to hangings, the only prescribed form of capital punishment, and prohibited newspaper reporters from attending executions or publishing any matters related to an execution “beyond the statement of the fact that such convict was on the day in question duly executed.”

Ramsey ruckus

In 1906, Walter Williams, convicted of murdering a teenage boy, was to be hanged in the basement of the Ramsey County Courthouse. Because of a miscalculation in the length of the rope, the murderer was left dangling for nearly 15 minutes before he was declared dead.

Front-page newspaper stories about the ruckus, commenting on its brutality, caused public clamor, including a promise by then-Gov. John Johnson that he would “resign [his] office” rather than “aid in the execution of a condemned man.”

Meanwhile, three newspapers that published articles about the hanging were charged with violating the anti-publication provision of the John Day Smith statute. The newspapers challenged the measure, claiming that it violated both federal and state constitutional protection for freedom of the press, a proposition rejected by a Ramsey County District Court judge.

The Minnesota Supreme Court heard the matter on a certified issue and affirmed the lower court ruling in State v. Pioneer Press, 110 N.W. 867 (Minn 1907). Rejecting claims under both the federal and state constitutions, the court held that the ban on reporting constituted a valid means to “avoid exciting and unwholesome effect on the public mind, while upholding ‘public morals.’” In so doing, it rejected the contention that the prohibition of publication was barred by the First Amendment, noting casually that the First Amendment did not apply to the states.

But back to the botched hanging. In 1911, during the height of the Progressive Era and with the woeful Williams denouement fresh in mind, the Legislature abolished capital punishment, replacing it with life imprisonment for first-degree murder, Minn. Stat. §609.185.

The twisted tale of capital punishment and its demise here in Minnesota is worth recalling as executions resume elsewhere in the country.

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PERSPECTIVES POINTERS

Top 10 States in Executions, 1976-2024

Texas: 598

Oklahoma: 125

Virginia: 113

Florida: 105

Missouri: 99

Georgia: 77

Alabama: 75

Ohio: 56

North Carolina: 43

South Carolina: 43

Marshall H. Tanick is an attorney with the Twin Cities law firm of Meyer, Njus, Tanick, Linder & Robbins.