The article below comes from a 1912 newspaper and gives light details into the day that the Sing Sing prison sent 7 men to the electric chair in the same day.
Seven Go To Their Death Over Electrocution Route At Sing Sing Prison
Ossining, N.Y., Aug. 12. — Seven men were sent to face their Maker in the little brick annex to Sing Sing prison today.
Five of them passed into Eternity and calling on God to prove their hands clean from blood.
One collapsed in a dead faint before he reached the chair and while still unconscious was killed.
The first man entered the death chamber at 4:59 , the last was declared dead at 6:14.
The victims were John W. Collins who, while insane from drink, shot and killed Policeman Michael Lynch, July 1, 1911; Joseph Ferrone, who cut his wife’s throat because she refused to lead a life of shame and give him her earnings; and Angelo Guista, Lorenzo Lebario Cali, Felipe de Marco, Salvatore de Marco, Vincenzo Cona, who participated in a series of robberies that ended in the murder of Mrs. Mary Hall, November 9 last.
The details of the executions are too horrible to print. Most of the Italians were mere youths. They went to their deaths protesting innocence.
Ferrone, the one black criminal among them, who spat at the judge on the bench and who tried to commit suicide in the court room went last. He went shouting “good-aby, good-a-lucky.”
There are still eleven prisoners in Sing Sing under penalty of death.
New York, Aug. 12. — The Italian colony is highly indignant over today’s wholesale electrocutions in Sing Sing. This is not because five of the victims were Italians, one man explained, but because it was felt that the executions were unjustifiable.
“It’s a fine advertisement for the United States,” said Giovanni Lordi, Mulberry street banker and member of the Italian chamber of commerce. “Brutal butchery is what I call it.
“Five Italians broke into a house. One of them killed a woman. Four of them did not commit murder, yet all five were executed. The most rabid advocate of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ cannot justify such an outrage.”
Washington, Aug. 12 — Mrs. Champ Clark, wife of the speaker, expressed herself today as alterably opposed to capital punishment.
“The seven executions today by New York state,” she said, “are striking examples of the inefficiency of the death policy. I believe with Bulwer Lytten that ‘the worst use to which you can put a man is to hang him.’”
Rep. Clayton of Alabama, chairman of the House judiciary committee, came out flatly for capital punishment. He said that the seven executions today in New York had not changed his opinions.
Source: The Day Book (Chicago, Illinois newspaper). August 12, 1912.
