A few years ago, I was in Mayville, NY site of the last public hanging in New York State, around Halloween, for the geoarchaeology survey of part of the "Millennium Pipeline" natural gas by way of Canada to Cleveland, using mostly pre-existing right of ways, to Mount Vernon, just outside New York City. The press was there at the time, because of an arrest of an HIV positive African-American for sleeping around there with minors. The governor was talking about using the death penalty for it, I'm not sure he knew about the venue, the "last hanging" up behind the diner next to the school.
It's the county seat of Chautauqua County, the origin of the famous circuit of learned talks for free for people in the US in the 19th century over important issues. The defendant was extradited to the Borough of the Bronx, NYC on a prior, where the D.A. had been previously confronted with "death penalty" requests by the now out-going governor and Republican Presidential candidate, George Pataki.
My 6th grade teacher's father was a newspaper photographer for the Chicago Sun and he once showed me some of the prints (not the negatives, press has them) of the "last hanging in Nevada, where thousands of people would come by train." It looked like a biblical wasteland with some sort of tripod in the middle of the whole event taken from atop a hill. He also had taken a small camera into the audience for the first woman to be given the electric chair, it taped to his trouser leg and uncovered long enough to get the horror of it and it was probably put on the front page.
Having grown up tying that hangman's knot, it seems a terrible waste not to get the rest of the story perhaps from the man, who might have been imprisoned instead whom might have written (as he did) a past historical record of the previous Iraqi history from the "top". Others associated, perhaps innocently with the past Iraqi government, are calumniated or "blackened" further.
Source: Newsvine - Curfews Imposed After Saddam's Execution#c452829
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