1977 In the 1960s people in the USA began to question the fairness and efficacy of the death penalty. It was racially biased, with African- Americans – 12 per cent of the population – making up 54 per cent of those executed. It was arbitrary, with some states invoking the punishment for rape and other offences as well as murder. By 1967 an informal moratorium was in place pending a definitive judgment by the Supreme Court.
When it came in 1972, Furman v. Georgia didn’t really decide the issue. The majority of Supreme Court justices ruled that the death penalty constituted a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in violation of the eighth amendment of the Constitution, but only two of them declared the penalty to be unconstitutional in all instances. The main burden of the judgement hit out at the arbitrary nature of offences punishable by death, and the racial bias of the penalty. The states were ordered to bring their statutes in line so as to reflect these concerns.
Gilmore was the ideal way back into the death penalty. First, he was white. Second, he had been convicted of shooting a motel manager in Provo, Utah, on 20 July 1976, and (though the second case never came to court) a gas station attendant on the day before. Third, he wanted to die, rejecting all attempts of anti-death-sentence groups to have the sentence commuted, and attempting suicide three times while awaiting his execution.
He was killed by firing squad at 8.07 in the morning on this day. Lacking a regular room for firing squads, the prison used its abandoned cannery instead. Gilmore’s last words were ‘Let’s do it’.
And the literary consequences? One was very short, a T-shirt sporting the murderer’s three last words. The other, weighing in at 1,024 pages, was the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Executioner’s Song (1980), arguably the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer’s best book. As though struck by the unfamiliar reality of Gilmore’s story, Mailer abandoned his usual self-referential, rococo style, in favour of a moving, documentary insight – based on interviews, letters and court records – into a complex personality and a momentous event.