TWAS THE DEVIL: HEARING THE CONSTITUTIONAL INFIRMITY OF THE MODERN AMERICAN DEATH PENALTY IN THE BYGONE SONGS OF OZARK FOLKLORE Chance Meyer* Il1 sing you a song It ain't much long It's in the case of murder -Reel 106, Item 2 INTRODUCTION ................................................................... 768 I. THE FOLKMURDERER OF THE ERSTWHILE OZARKS ....... 784 II. ECHOES OF OZARK MURDER BALLADS AMIDST TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY ExECUTIONS ....................................... 814 A . David Z ink ............................................................... 817 B . Cecil Clayton ........................................................... 823 C. Walter Storey ........................................................... 830 D . E arl R ingo ............................................................... 832 E. M ichael Worthington .............................................. 836 F. Gary Welch ............................................................... 839 III. THE MURDERER-OF-LAW, WHO LIVES IN THE EIGHTH AM ENDMENT ................................................................ 845 IV. THE RIVALRY OF LORE AND LAW IN THE MODERN CAPITAL JURY Box ....................................................... 850 C ON CLU SION ....................................................................... 856 * Professor of Practice, Shepard Broad College of Law, Nova Southeastern University; J.D., Tulane Law School. This Article benefited from the sobering insights of historian Brooks Blevins and is dedicated to my father, who loves that stretch of river that runs out of Ponca, on into Jasper. 768 MISSISSIPPI LAW JOURNAL [VOL. 87:5 INTRODUCTION Times are not what they used to be.1 In the nineteenth century, a folklore of mysticism 2 ran deep through the Ozark region. 3 Some was of mere trifles. Blue jays were said to fly down to hell on Fridays to help the devil gather kindling. 4 Redbud trees, like the one in which Judas hanged himself, were thought better avoided after dark in the springtime. 5 Perhaps few believed such things. But the collective lore of the Ozarks, 6 as a primary means of learning and sharing attitudes, values, and beliefs, shaped the way hillfolk thought about and interpreted the world. 7 According 1 Carol Elizabeth Jones, Ginny Hawker & Hazel Dickens, Times Are Not What They Used to Be, on HEART OF A SINGER (Rounder Records 2005). 2 See VANCE RANDOLPH, OZARK MAGIC AND FOLKLORE 3-9 (1964) (describing the prevalence of mystical folklore in the Ozarks). 3 A "widely accepted illustration of the physical boundaries of the Ozarks region" can be found in the writings of Milton D. Rafferty, former Professor of Geography at Missouri State University. See WAYMAN HOGUE, BACK YONDER: AN OZARK CHRONICLE, xxxiv n.19 (2016). This Article utilizes Rafferty's map, which includes Northwest and Northcentral Arkansas, a wide swath of Southern Missouri, a far corner of Northeast Oklahoma, and perhaps a tiny tip of Southeast Kansas. See MILTON D. RAFFERTY, THE OZARKS: LAND AND LIFE 2 (1980). But there is much debate among geographers over the exact boundaries of the region. See BROOKS BLEVINS, HILL FOLKS: A HISTORY OF ARKANSAS OZARKERS & THEIR IMAGE xi (2002). In fact, the Ozarks being neglected by social scientists and historians might be due in part to uncertainty over whether the Ozarks can even be said to belong to the South, the Midwest, or the West. See id. It seems the Ozark region is so cloaked in mystery that experts can hardly point to it on a map. 4 See RANDOLPH, supra note 2, at 248. 5 See id. at 263 (describing the "great storm of criticism" that followed the Oklahoma Legislature naming the Redbud Oklahoma's State Tree in 1937, because "[s]ome hillfolk ... fe[lt] that the redbud or Judas tree is bewitched, at least in the spring, and it is well to keep away from blooming redbuds after dark."). 6 Genres of study in folkloristics include "myth, folktale, legend, ballad, proverb, riddle, superstition, etc." ALAN DUNDES, FOLKLORE MATTERS viii (1989). This Article primarily examines material at the intersection of ballads and superstition. However, it should be noted that "[a]lthough folklorists often speak in terms of folklore genres, many aspects of culture may derive from or include folkloristic elements," Olufunmilayo B. Arewa, Youtube, UGC, and Digital Music: Competing Business and Cultural Models in the Internet Age, 104 Nw. U. L. REV. 431, 461 (2010), such as the law. 7 Folklore is "a primary vehicle for the communication and continuation of attitudes and values" and "represents a people's image of themselves." ALAN A. DUNDES, INTERPRETING FOLKLORE viii, 174 (1980). "Folklore as a mirror of culture provides unique raw material for those eager to better understand themselves and others." Id. at viii. It "reflects a society," id. at 174, and has long "served a powerful role 2018] TWAS THE DEVIL 769 to that prolific but wily folklorist Vance Randolph, Ozarkers had "little interest in the mental procedure that the moderns call science" and their "ways of arranging data and evaluating evidence [were] very different from those ...favored in the world beyond the hilltops."8 Though not true of all Ozarkers, his observation was certainly true of some. When in 1896 a devilish image appeared mysteriously on the cupola of a church in the Ozark town of Fair Grove, Missouri, the Springfield Republican reported, "Some were quite sure it was the work of the devil; others believed it the work of God. Some thought it the work of human hands, and some thought it had been caused by a leak in the roof."9 From early on, reason and the supernatural-the earthly and the unearthly-walked hand-in-hand in the Ozarks. Then came radios and railroads, televisions and highways. To hear Randolph tell it, the region had been frozen in time before their arrival.10 Afterwards, new thoughts flowed in, along with new ways to think them." He portrayed the hill country as an enchanted land of backwoods peculiarity, beset by the newfangled ways of the modern world.12 Historians have set about debunking Randolph's Ozark exceptionalism. 13 But certainly things changed in the Ozarks of the twentieth century, as things are wont to do. After the First Great War, Americans "[f]aced with the burdens of the modern age" were drawn to the Arcadian imagery of the Upland South.' 4 So too after the Second, Americans yearned for a simpler, preatomic time. 15 They came in search of quiet porch swings and slow rivers. And with generations of postwar and Cold in shaping ideology about culture and cultural production." Arewa, supra note 6, at 461. 8 RANDOLPH, supra note 2, at 3. 9 Id. at 229-31 (quoting the Springfield Republican as inviting anyone who might "entertain the idea that superstition is forever banished from the minds of the American people" to "visit just now the little town of Fair Grove in Greene county"). 10 Randolph referred to a "standardizing transformation" in the thinking and behavior of Ozarkers "[w]herever railroads and highways penetrate[d], wherever newspapers and movies and radios [were] introduced." Id. at 9. 11 See id. 12 See BLEVINS, supra note 3, at 1-7. 13 See, e.g., SIMON J. BRONNER, FOLLOWING TRADITION: FOLKLORE IN THE DISCOURSE OF AMERICAN CULTURE 226-27 (1998); BLEVINS, supra note 3, at 1-7. 14 See BLEVINS, supra note 3, at 2. 15 See id. 770 MISSISSIPPI LAW JOURNAL [VOL. 87:5 War dreamers came a broad diversity of thought. Randolph, who had first visited the Ozarks in 1899 and later moved there in 1920 16 to live among his research subjects for the better part of his life, observed-perhaps a little despondently--"educated young folk are certainly less concerned with witchcraft and the like than were their parents and grandparents."'17 Yet, in one of his shrewder moments, Randolph also predicted, "A great body of folk belief dies very slowly."' 8 So it does. Ozark-born soldiers who wore rings forged from gallows nails based on the superstition that they protected against a violent death (and, conveniently, venereal disease) 19 were not, as one might think, wielding muskets for the Confederacy at Fort Sumter; they were wielding M1 Carbines for the Allies on the Western Front. 20 That is to say, these were not the Rebels of the 1860s, but United States Army soldiers of the 1940s. The nails came from the hanging platform in Galena, where at dawn on May 21, 1937, the Ozark State of Missouri had made Rosco "Red" Jackson 2' the last capital defendant in the nation to be executed publicly. 22 It was reported that a crowd of hundreds "hummed with a gruesomely festive air,"23 as onlookers fought for better vantages from "the good perches in the trees" 24 around the gallows. Lore of such provenance does not vanish overnight. I grew up in the Ozarks of the late twentieth century, where there was still superstitious folklore to be found.25 My parents had 16 See RANDOLPH, supra note 2, at 4. 17 Id. at 7-8. is Id. at 9. 19 See id. at 152. 20 See id. 21 See Stephanie Simon, McVeigh's Coming Execution Recalls Morbid 1937 Spectacle, L.A. TIMES (May 6, 2001), http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/O6/news/mn- 60519 [https://perma.cc/9VBU-B4PB]. 22 See id. (That was the last public execution in the United States: the last time the government killed a convict before so large a crowd."). 23 Id. 24 Tim O'Neil, Galena's Gruesome Claim to Fame, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH, March 20, 2001, at El. 25 See, e.g., Jack Weatherly, MBJ BUSINESS PERSON OF THE YEAR: Joe Max Higgins of the Golden Triangle's LINK, MISS. BuS. J. (Dec. 28, 2016), http://msbusiness.comJ2016/12/mbj-business-person-year-joe-max-higgins-golden- triangles-link [https://perma.cc/2RRZ-NXN3] (referring to the practice of water witching occurring during this time). 2018] TWAS THE DEVIL 771 come to Northwest Arkansas with that same longing that today's foremost Ozark historian Brooks Blevins refers to as a "foggy-eyed nostalgia" for "some physical and spiritual connection to a frontier long vanished."26 Though not exactly a barefoot hayseed, I did, at one time or another, eat hog's jowl by the campfire and drink moonshine in the cellar, where they keep the stories.