UAlbany Launches Project to Digitize History of Executions in U.S.

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The mug shot of 14-year-old George Stinney (part of the M. Watt Espy Collection at UAlbany), the youngest person to be sentenced to death and executed in the United States following a racially-biased trial. For more than 40 years, Espy, an opponent of the death penalty, traced the often tragic history of legal executions in the United States.



ALBANY, N.Y. (April 17, 2017) – The M. Watt Espy Papers, execution files on more than 15,000 legal executions in the United States since 1608, are getting a digital makeover.
Hailed by the New York Times as "America's foremost death penalty historian," M. Watt Espy (1933-2009) devoted more than 40 years to cataloging each legal execution since the founding of the Jamestown Colony. In 2008, Espy donated his collection to the University at Albany Libraries’ National Death Penalty Archive.
The work is supported through a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), which selected UAlbany to receive a 2016 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant. As one of only 17 awards out of a total of 144 applications nationwide, the grant will create the Digital Archive of Executions in the United States, 1608-2002 from the M. Watt Espy Papers’ execution files on over 15,000 legal executions in the United States.
The Digital Archive of Executions will be a searchable database of nearly 150,000 documents freely available online to scholars, researchers, and students with metadata available on individuals executed, their race, gender, crime, and method of execution, along with Espy’s written analysis.
A first of its kind database, the Digital Archive of Executions will appeal to a broad range of scholars, including those interested in history, political science, criminal justice, sociology or law. Future researchers might utilize specific records related to individual criminal cases, while others might review broader material to analyze umbrella issues, like innocents executed, or collect data to mount a legal defense.
All of this information will ...

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