Send this story Print this story

Adjust text size

Feature: Give 'em enough rope...
...and Victorian-era Marinites will ruin public hangings for everybody

by Joy Lanzendorfer

On the first day of September, 1893, Lee Doon was condemned to die for killing a white man. Doon, who was Chinese, was the cook for San Rafael resident Tiernan Berry, who also hired an Englishman named William Shenton to paint his house. At the end of the first day of painting, Shenton called Doon out of the kitchen and ordered him to clean up his paint buckets and ladders, apparently believing it was the Chinese servant's job to pick up after him. Doon refused. The next day, Shenton repeated his order and when Doon again refused, an argument broke out, during which "the painter became verbally abusive to Lee Doon," according to an article by the Marin County Historical Society.

Doon claimed that Shenton attacked him and began beating and kicking him, according to the Supreme Court decision on the case. Either way, things got so heated that Doon rushed into the house, grabbed a pistol and shot at Shenton four times, hitting him once in the back. He was seriously wounded and died not long afterward. Doon was arrested, underwent a trial and was sentenced to death by hanging at the Marin County Courthouse located at Fourth and A streets in San Rafael.

The courthouse had been designed with executions in mind. When it was built in 1873, hangings were moved from the official "hang-man's tree"—a 200-year-old oak that used to be located on E Street—to the courthouse lobby. The gallows had a trapdoor for the convicted man to fall through, cutting-edge technology for the time. Just the year before the courthouse was built, a man named William Marwood had developed the "long drop" method of hanging, where the hangman determined how far the body should drop based on the person's height and weight. It was considered an improvement over the "standard drop," where everyone was dropped the same distance regardless of size, because the long drop guaranteed that the person's neck would snap, rendering him instantly unconscious. With the standard drop, whether the criminals lost consciousness or not was up to luck, and they often strangled for a few minutes before passing out.

In those days, it was common for crowds to attend hangings. Among formalities such as having a physician and the district attorney present at an execution, the law required the county sheriff to have at least 12 men witness the execution. This was often interpreted to mean that whoever wanted to could come to the hanging. And it turned out, many people did want to do just that. The noose from a hanging was a prized souvenir among Victorian Californians.

Doon's hanging, with its peculiar mix of yellow-peril racism, would be of particular interest to the public, as Marin County Sheriff Henry Harrison knew very well. So he had tickets for the hanging printed up and gave them out to the public. Soon, these tickets were a hot commodity all over the Bay Area. On the day of the execution, 800 people showed up to watch Doon hang.

It was a hot day. By 10am, people were showing up "on foot, on horseback, in wagons and by train," according to the newspaper County Journal. The tickets were apparently forgotten as everyone squeezed into the courthouse, many drunk and boisterous, all excited to see a man put to death.

At 11am, the guards brought Doon out of his jail cell. He was greeted with jeers and shouting, but he remained calm as the black hood was put over his head and the rope around his neck. With a loud bang, the trapdoor of the gallows slammed open and Doon's body fell. His neck broke and his spinal cord was severed; although he was unconscious, his body was not yet dead. He would slowly suffocate over the next 15 or 20 minutes as his body hung at the end of the noose.

Everyone scrambled to get a good look at the twitching body, jumping on each other's backs and pushing each other aside. A dentist from San Rafael fainted. The uproar grew louder when Doon was pronounced dead and the rope was removed from his neck. The noose was then cut into pieces and auctioned off as souvenirs.

Afterward, the crowd descended on the streets of San Rafael. Since there were over a dozen bars within two blocks of the courthouse, the rest of the day was full of riotous, bloodthirsty excitement, the likes of which appalled people in the vicinity.

The public reaction was negative and most newspapers condemned the incident.

"When the sheriff of Marin County invited a boisterous mob to come into the San Rafael jail and enjoy the amusement of watching a Chinaman dangle at the end of a rope[,] he probably was thinking of merely making himself solid with the voters of the vicinity," the San Francisco Examiner sarcastically noted. "But in the pursuit of this laudable purpose he found it necessary not only to outrage decency, which he may not have thought an important consideration, but to violate the spirit and probably the letter of the law."

The violation here was that in 1890, California had changed the law so that all executions would be carried out in a state prison, either San Quentin or Folsom. In fact, there had already been a state execution that March—Jose Gabriel, who was sentenced in San Diego for killing an elderly couple, was hanged at San Quentin.

Doon's hanging brought home the need to have the death penalty carried out in private, and from then on, hangings were no longer held in county courthouses. From 1893 to 1941, 215 prisoners were hanged at San Quentin until the method was abolished in favor of the gas chamber.

And since Folsom stopped executing prisoners in 1937, Marin County has the distinction of being the only county where executions still take place today. Hangings, however, are a thing of the past. Today, the executions are done by lethal injection.

Hang with Joy at joy@greenfly.net.