Delaware Dismantles Gallows After 17 Years

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By Associated Press

Published: 08/06/2003

The executioner wore a yellow hard hat instead of a black hood. The condemned stood tall and silent, as if resigned to fate.
On July 8, there was no formal pronouncement of a death sentence, no chanting or sign-waving by death penalty opponents. Just the hot sun beating down on the prison buildings at the Delaware Correctional Center.
It was over in seconds, at 8:51 a.m. With the tug of a backhoe, Delaware's gallows - built to hang prisoners - was sent crashing to the ground, and into the history books.
Two short beeps on the horn of the backhoe signaled its death knell.
State prison officials ordered the dismantling of the 17-year-old structure, which was used only once, after it was rendered obsolete by the recent resentencing of former Death Row inmate James W. Riley.
Riley, sentenced to death in 1982 for his role in the robbery and killing of a Dover liquor store owner, was the last prisoner in Delaware eligible for hanging.
Because he was sentenced before 1986, when lethal injection became the new method of execution, Riley had a choice between hanging and lethal injection.
Riley, 42, was granted a retrial earlier this year and was sentenced in May to life in prison without parole. With his sentencing, the gallows was no longer needed. So a Department of Correction maintenance crew took to the gallows with saws, crowbars and the backhoe in the maintenance yard where convicted killer Billy Bailey was hanged on Jan. 25, 1996.
Deputy warden Betty Burris said Tuesday the gallows hasn't changed since the day Bailey died.
The trapdoor on the 14-foot-high platform was in the sprung position, a square of red tape marking where the condemned prisoner was meant to stand. Three small pulleys were still attached to the heavy yellow pine beams, as was the rusting metal cylinder around which the rope was wound.
Prison officials said the space occupied by the gallows will be used by the maintenance unit, and that the debris from the gallows be disposed of 'in an appropriate manner.'
'We do not think it is appropriate to have pieces of the Delaware gallows show up on eBay,' said Department of Correction spokeswoman Beth Welch.
The dismantling of the gallows leaves New Hampshire and Washington as the only states in which hanging is still allowed as an alternative to lethal injection. New Hampshire has not executed anyone by any method since a hanging in 1939, but two killers who each murdered three people have been hanged in Washington in the past decade, one in 1993 and one in 1994.
While Delaware no longer has a gallows, it does still have the death penalty. Fourteen men remain on Death Row at the Smyrna prison, with execution dates set for two of them - on Aug. 8 and Oct. 17.

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