Penitent Bodies: The Sheriff and Executioner
A criminal with a soul properly prepared to meet the afterlife often delivÂered the executioner a body of little resistance. However, this was never a fait accompli since the clergy were not always successful in their attempts at getting the criminal to repent.
An example of this was at the execuÂtion of John Jenkins in colonial Sydney. He was under the care of the experienced Father John McEncroe on the scaffold, a man who had attended some seventy-five executions in three years.[327] Yet Jenkins used his dying speech to falsely confess to the crimes of his prison associates and encourage everyone watching to take to the bush and commit more murders.[328] In these situations it often fell to the sheriff and executioner to take charge of the situation. The executioner could apply physical coercion directly to the body of the criminal whereas the sheriff, as repreÂsentative of the law, ran the ceremony to his pleasure and could use other means to reduce the likelihood of criminal misbehaviour.To assess the role of the sheriff on days of execution a good place to start is with the hanging of John Troy and Thomas Smith, two highway robbers who mounted the scaffold in Sydney after being found guilty under the Bushranger Act.[329] Smith was coolheaded in putting the case to the crowd that his companion, due at the gallows only a few days later, was to hang for a crime that he had in fact committed. Troy then came forward to state that Smith was innocent, placing full responsibility for the crime in question upon his own shoulders. One correspondent present at the hanging records how these claims were subtly dealt with by the Sheriff:
The Sheriff here interrupted him, observing that �he had done very right in allowing the justice of his own sentence, but begged he would not arraign the justice of another’s.
He did not like to interrupt him at such an awful moment, but it was his painful duty.’ On hearing this, Smith again spoke, â€?surely Mr. Sheriff, you do not begrudge us these few moments to speak our minds.’ The Clergymen... recommended that their last words should be in prayer.[330]Another example of a Sheriff, or in this case the Under-Sheriff, interÂvening to the advantage of proper decorum was at the 1848 execution of William Fyfe, a Moreton Bay convict who was tried and hanged in Sydney. Found guilty of murder, Fyfe was convinced of his innocence and carefully penned a speech to recite on the gallows that reflected this sentiment. However, Fyfe was never able to read his hand-written speech as it was â€?surreptitiously’ taken off him by the Under-Sheriff while the criminal was still in his cell.[331] A less than pleased Reverend William Richie told a newspaper the following day that the condemned man in his care â€?knew nothing of the loss [of his speech] till he put his hand into his bosom to feel for the document, which assuredly was there when about to leave his cell’.[332] Ritchie agreed that Under-SheriffProut had the right to strip the prisoner of such material before leaving for the gallows but to do it without informing him was unreasonable. â€?If this be not theft’, wrote the Reverend, â€?I know not how to designate the deed’.[333] On the scaffold, the Under-Sheriff read the death warrant aloud to the waiting crowd but when Fyfe repeatedly declared his innocence the cap was hastily pulled over his eyes by the executioner and the bolt was drawn.[334] The Sydney Morning Herald did not care for the wish of the authorities to suppress Fyfe’s plea of innocence and published his preÂprepared speech alongside the details of his hanging. The troublesome document that was taken off the body of Fyfe concluded with the line: â€?I shall appear at the bar of Almighty God as innocent as the child in its mother's womb'.[335]
If the Sheriff, or his representative, was unable to prevent the criminal from misbehaving, it was left to the executioner who, as a last resort, would muscle the condemned into place.
Executioners were not averse to the physicality required for the job, with the official post of hangman so undesirable that vacancies were mostly filled from within the crimÂinal class.[336] Alexander Green, one of Australia's most well-known colonial executioners, was himself transported to New South Wales in 1824 for shoplifting. He soon became chief â€?scourger' at the gaol before assuming the position of the colony's official executioner in 1828.[337] His post as chief hangman of New South Wales lasted from 1828 to 1855 during which time he was said to have executed 490 criminals.[338] A biographical work on Green recounts numerous episodes of him carrying through with his duty in the face of violent resistance on the part of the crimÂinal. Examples range from being pushed off the scaffold himself by a wild felon to restraining another from jumping off the scaffold and committing suicide.[339] It demonstrates how Green was there to make sure the law's wishes were fulfilled, no matter the level of verbal or physical hostility emanating from the criminal.