A Brief History
On January 17, 1977, an otherwise unremarkable murderer, Gary Gilmore, became famous when he was executed by firing squad by the State of Utah. Gilmore, born Faye Robert Coffman, was the first person executed in the United States after nearly a decade long hiatus mandated by the US Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia in 1972 that held capital punishment as practiced in the US was “cruel and unusual.”
Digging Deeper
Gilmore was notable for insisting on being executed, and for demanding that he face a firing squad of five police officers armed with 30-30 caliber rifles rather than the alternate means of execution by hanging.
In many cases, people have become more famous for how they died than how they lived, for reasons including the unusual manner of their death, the historic circumstances of their death, their famous last words, or other factors.
St. Joan of Arc, or more correctly Jeanne d’Arc, was burned to death for heresy in 1431 after leading French forces against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. Although somewhat famous in her day, he defiant death, refusing to recant, made her a name that reverberates through the centuries.
Nathan Hale, an American patriot and spy was hanged by the British in 1776, famously saying, “I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
And finally, Thích Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, became world famous when he burned himself to death in Saigon in 1963, appearing in a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of his death. Other people that have self-immolated have also become at least temporarily famous.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: Who would you add to this list?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Gilmore, Mikal. Shot in the Heart. Knopf Doubleday, 1995.
Wellman, Billy. Joan of Arc: An Enthralling Guide to a Peasant Girl’s Rise in Medieval France and Her Timeless Legacy as a National Heroine. Billy Wellman, 2024.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by World Coalition Against the Death Penalty of a protest against the death penalty, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
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