ABSTRACT
Lethal punishment has taken the lives of thousands of people in the United States. These killings fall into two categories, legal executions and illegal lynchings. Questions about the relationship between the two have engaged scholars since at least the early years of the twentieth century and continue to generate research. This chapter explores the relationship by addressing two main issues: the link between lynchings and executions during the lynching era, and the lingering influence of lynching on modern capital punishment. The death penalty in America faces legal and legislative challenges, while the pace of death sentences and executions is steeply declining. The term lynching covers a heterogeneous range of behavior, ranging from quiet killings by a small group of disguised men to public events drawing thousands of spectators who sometimes posed for photographs. W. Fitzhugh Brundage classified lynch mobs into four types: The "mass mob"; the posse; the organized "terrorist" mob; and the "private" mob.
