"This chronological discussion of the death penalty in Missouri covers those executed from 1803 through 2005. Chapters discuss such topics as the death penalty offenses of Indians and blacks; death sentences carried out by the military; lynchings; the gas chamber; the executions of rapists, juveniles, and women; pardons and commutations; appellate court reversals; and lethal injection"--Provided by publisher.

The history of the execution of women in the United States has largely been ignored and scholars have given scant attention to gender issues in capital punishment. This historical analysis examines the social, political and economic contexts in which the justice system has put women to death, revealing a pattern of patriarchal domination and female subordination. The book includes a discussion of condemned women granted executive clemency and judicial commutations, an inquiry into women falsely convicted in potentially capital cases and a profile of the current female death row population.

In the five state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri, 1027 men and women are known to have been legally hanged, gassed or electrocuted for capital crimes during the century after the Civil War. Drawing on thousands of hours of research, this comprehensive record covers each execution in chronological order, filling numerous gaps in a largely forgotten story of the American experience. The author presents each case dispassionately with the main focus given to essential facts.

Until recently, many of Missouri’s legal records were inaccessible and the existence of many influential, historic cases was unknown. The ten essays in this volume showcase Missouri as both maker and microcosm of American history. Some of the topics are famous: Dred Scott’s slave freedom suit, Virginia Minor’s women’s suffrage case, Curt Flood’s suit against professional baseball, and the Nancy Cruzan “right to die” case. Other essays cover court cases concerning the uneasy incorporation of ethnic and cultural populations into the United States; political loyalty tests during the Civil War; the alleviation of cruelty to poor and criminally institutionalized children; the barring of women to serve on juries decades after they could vote; and the creation of the “Missouri Court Plan,” a national model for judicial selection.

Frank and Jesse James, the infamous brothers from Missouri, rode with marauding Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. Having learned to kill and raid without compunction, they easily transitioned from rebels to outlaws after the war, robbing stagecoaches, banks and trains in Missouri and surrounding states. It was a botched bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota, followed by an improbable escape through the Dakota Territory and Iowa, that elevated the James brothers from notorious criminals to legendary figures of American history and folklore.

In 1933, Genevieve Yost, Kansas State Historical Society cataloger, published a "History of Lynching in Kansas." The present book is a development of that work, researched with the benefit of modern technology. The author locates 58 lynchings Yost missed and removes 19 from her list that for various reasons are not lynchings in Kansas. Yost apparently catalogued her 123 entries, some containing up to six names, based on her newspaper sources' headlines, not the actual stories on the lynchings. Her catalog places some events in counties that did not exist at the time of the lynching. In this book, errors in her data are corrected: misspelled names, incorrect places and dates, and the number of victims per incident. In agreement with Yost, the author finds that most of the victims were white men who were horse thieves, their deaths taking place in the eastern tier of counties bordering Missouri, an area then and now where most Kansans lived. The last lynching in Kansas took place in 1932 in the extreme northwest of the state, and an interview of an eyewitness is included.