Remembering the rope: Maine’s 200-year connection to—and disconnection from—capital punishment.

By Clif Travers

We were not the first state. In fact, we were the fourth—after Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin—to abolish the death penalty. But the decision wasn’t easy. It took twenty-one hangings for Mainers to decide we had no taste for the deed of killing. Fifty-six years after we became our own state with our own ethics, Maine abolished capital punishment, brought it back in 1883 for the judgment of murder, but then rescinded that change four years later

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