Capital punishment

Capital punishment in In Cold Blood is not only the penalty sought and imposed for the Clutter murders; it is a contested principle made visible through courtroom argument, prison architecture, and execution. The book sets the state’s demand for retribution and public protection against appeals to mercy and objections to state killing, then follows those arguments to their consequence for Perry Smith and Richard Eugene Hickock.

The trial’s competing arguments

At the trial’s final session, the state’s case was presented by Duane West, supported by Logan Green, an experienced criminal lawyer retained as a special assistant because West was considered too inexperienced to prosecute the case alone. Green’s presence made the closing argument a performance as well as a legal submission: local notables and visiting lawyers had come to hear him, while Judge Tate’s instructions and West’s summation had already framed the jury’s task. West argued that both defendants were equally guilty regardless of which man had fired the shotgun, and asked for death as the maximum penalty, presenting that request as enforcement of the law rather than vengeance.

The defense placed religious and moral objections before the jury. Arthur Fleming appealed to the distinction between the human body and the soul, arguing that the state should not destroy the body that houses an immortal soul. Harrison Smith also invoked the jurors’ Christianity, but made the harms of capital punishment his central case: in his view, a state that condemns the taking of life and then carries it out contradicts its own principle, fails to deter crime, and diminishes respect for human life. He asked for mercy in the form of life imprisonment. The narrative notes the fatigue of at least one juror during these speeches, a small counterpoint to the solemnity the advocates sought to establish.

Green answered both pleas by turning the question from the defendants’ claims to the victims’ absence. He argued that the defense lawyers could plead for mercy because they had not been present at the Clutter home, and used the Bible to challenge the idea that Christianity necessarily opposed execution. He then set aside theological debate and invoked Kansas law, which allowed either life imprisonment or death by hanging for first-degree murder. His central calculation was that the murders had been committed for a small amount of money, which he contrasted with the lives taken. He warned that a lesser sentence might allow the defendants to escape or be paroled, and pressed the jurors to consider the possibility that their own families could later be endangered. One young reporter judged the address brutal and inflammatory, showing that Green’s forceful appeal did not command universal approval among those who heard it.

State authority and the prison setting

The book places this jury decision within a changing Kansas history. The state abolished capital punishment in 1907, restored it in 1935 amid concern about violent professional criminals, and resumed executions in 1944. Nine more executions followed over the next decade. By 1954, however, Kansas had gone six years without an execution, apart from executions at the military prison. Governor George Docking, in office from 1957 through 1960, opposed the death penalty; the narrative connects his position to the pause in executions. By April 1960, 190 people in United States prisons awaited civil execution, five of them at Lansing, including Smith and Hickock.

The institutional setting makes punishment tangible. Leavenworth County contained two state penitentiaries, a major federal prison, and the military prison at Fort Leavenworth. The Kansas State Penitentiary for Men, built during the Civil War and receiving its first prisoner in 1864, held an average population of about 2,000 within a walled compound of cells, workshops, and cement streets. Death Row occupied the upper floor of a small, coffin-shaped building used for segregation and isolation. Its execution chamber was a storage room containing prison supplies and an unpainted wooden gallows. Prisoners’ euphemism for being taken there, a visit to the warehouse, makes the institution’s administrative language sit uneasily beside the finality of the sentence.

Smith and Hickock were initially scheduled to be executed six weeks after the trial, at one minute past midnight on May 13, 1960. That date did not hold. Their case continued through years of appeals, during which the prison sentence was repeatedly delayed but not overturned. The separation between legal decision and physical execution is central to the book’s treatment of capital punishment: the sentence is pronounced in court, maintained through procedure, and finally enacted in a prison room that is at once an ordinary storage space and the state’s execution chamber.

Delay, appeal, and the final order

Three years later, Joseph P. Jenkins and Robert Bingham replaced Shultz as the defense lawyers. Appointed by a federal judge and working without compensation, they filed multiple appeals, arguing that counsel had not been appointed until after the defendants confessed and waived preliminary hearings, that their trial representation had been inadequate, and that evidence had been used despite being seized without a search warrant. Their efforts postponed three execution dates: October 25, 1962, August 8, 1963, and February 18, 1965.

Jenkins and Bingham carried the case to the Supreme Court of the United States three times. Each time, the Court declined to grant certiorari, leaving the appeals without a full hearing there. In March 1965, after nearly 2,000 days on Death Row, the Kansas Supreme Court ordered that the executions take place between midnight and 2:00 a.m. on April 14. William Avery, the newly elected governor, refused a clemency appeal, saying intervention would not serve the best interests of Kansas. The sequence presents legal review and executive clemency as distinct possible checks on the sentence; neither changed the outcome.

The book also records a contradiction in Hickock’s expressed position. In prison, he accepted the idea that capital punishment was revenge and argued that revenge mattered; he said he believed in hanging when he was imagining himself as a victim’s relative, but not when he himself faced execution. His stance grants emotional force to the public demand for retaliation while exposing how differently that demand appears to the condemned person. It complicates any account of the sentence as a purely abstract principle, without excusing the crimes or resolving the ethical dispute.

The executions and their human meaning

On April 14, 1965, Alvin Dewey read the newspaper account of the executions in a Topeka hotel after having watched them at the prison. Hickock died first, at 12:41 a.m.; Smith died at 1:19. The printed report reduced the deaths to a headline and a few lines, while Dewey’s presence as a witness connected the public record to the officials and observers gathered in the prison. He had expected a setting of dignity, but found the execution chamber bleak and cluttered; the gallows itself, with its two nooses, supplied the ceremony’s stark focus.

Before Hickock’s execution, he asked whether any member of the Clutter family had come to witness it. None had. He appeared disappointed, as if their absence left the ritual incomplete. He then said he held no hard feelings, described the next world as better than this one, and shook hands with the four Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents who had requested permission to attend: Roy Church, Clarence Duntz, Harold Nye, and Dewey. The courteous gestures do not undo the sentence or the crimes; they reveal how the execution assembled captors, condemned man, chaplain, guards, and witnesses into a final public encounter.

Smith recognized Dewey when he entered and greeted him with a grin and wink, but became solemn when asked for a final statement. He objected to capital punishment on both moral and legal grounds, suggested that he might have had something to contribute, and apologized for what he had done. Before the mask was adjusted, he spat his chewing gum into the chaplain’s hand. These details place an individual voice and a small, deliberate gesture inside the state’s fixed procedure; the sentence allows no further exchange once the execution begins.

Dewey believed that capital punishment deterred violent crime and considered the penalty earned in this case. Yet Smith elicited a different response from him than Hickock had: Dewey could not disregard what the narrative describes as Smith’s quality of an exiled, wounded creature. That response does not reverse Dewey’s view of the law, but it keeps judgment from settling into a single, uncomplicated verdict. Across the trial and the executions, capital punishment appears as lawful authority, an argument about deterrence and retribution, and an irreversible act whose human consequences remain visible even to those who support it.