Just a month after Cecil Davis’s death, Florence Murphy, a black man convicted of rape, was executed. Unlike Davis, Murphy’s death was planned well in advance, and carried out in Huntsville’s electric chair, under the supervision of numerous state officials. Though few witnesses saw Cecil Davis die, his death was duly recorded in the 1940 Annual Report.^[49] Florence Murphy’s was not.

Curiously, despite the long list of ailments and treatments that prison doctors offered, only once in the years between 1929 and 1941 did Texas prison doctors record ‘legal execution’ as a cause of death. Even then, in 1931, only one of the 10 executions was recorded. This was not due to ignorance. Prison doctors participated in legal executions, placing a stethoscope on the steaming chest of the man strapped into the electric chair, and announcing the time of death.^[50] While legal electrocution was the most common cause of death in Texas prisons in the 1930s, no Annual Reports mentioned this ultimate state sanction. Along with the invisibility of executions behind prison walls came a stark historical silence over those condemned to death. Yet even in this administrative silence we can find continuities between the local ‘justice’ of lynch mobs, assumed by a more powerful state.

On an administrative level, condemned prisoners existed in a bureaucratic netherworld between the local, county-level retributive justice of the lynch mob and the state-level mechanisms of punishment and execution. Though they lived and died at Huntsville and under the state-level prison system, in most regards, the condemned existed at the local county level. It was only in 1924 that the state of Texas began performing executions; prior to then offenders were executed by sheriffs in the counties where people were sentenced. It may have been due to the tradition that the condemned only arrived in Huntsville one month prior to their execution date, that they were in a liminal space between the injured and the dead — encapsulated precisely in the name ‘the death house’. Their names were not recorded in the convict ledgers and indices; these were the record books of those living in prison, not those dying there. Nor was capital punishment discussed in meetings of the Prison Board. At this bureaucratic level, the condemned were considered to be under the jurisdiction of the county and district courts rather than the state. Indeed, Texas counties paid $25 to the state for the use of its cells and execution facilities.^[51]

Together, these facts represent a link between the traditions of lynch violence and modern state execution. W. Fitzhugh Brundage argues that the history of lynching needs to be analysed at the local level, in order to assess the complex local power struggles and structures that went into this horrific form of racial violence.^[52] State killing left the hands of local sheriffs and disordered mobs, becoming centralised in state institutions, but capital cases were tried and sentences handed down at the local level, by local district attorneys and judges who, like local elites a generation earlier, were players in political struggles and power dynamics in which race, class, the fear of crime and the ‘public’ sanction of revenge played key roles. This local exercise of justice bridged the transition from the lynch era to state execution.

Yet the most concrete connection between lynch violence and capital punishment came at the discretion of local judges and juries, and for cases in which they pressed for execution rather than a lengthy sentence. Rape, and particularly the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man, consistently drew the local municipalities’ harshest legal wrath. The probability of a black man being executed for rape was vastly higher than the probability of a white man on the same charge. Indeed, black men were between five- and 10-times more likely to be executed for rape than white men, and this reached the high point toward the end of the Depression, when black men were almost 20-times more likely to be put to death for rape than whites. Furthermore, men executed for rape were far more likely to be convicted and sentenced in east Texas, the region where slavery’s roots were deepest, and where most lynching took place.^[53]