Law enforcement submitted a bloody handprint from the crime scene for expert analysis but neither presented the results at trial nor disclosed them to the defense. Robare had been stabbed 47 times with an ice pick and suffered two broken ribs and a skull fracture but Williams had no blood on him. Williams - the youngest person ever put to death in the Commonwealth - was tried, convicted, and condemned by an all-White, all-male jury in less than a day. In 1931, Pennsylvania executed sixteen-year-old Alexander McClay Williams in the state’s electric chair on false charges that he had murdered Vida Robare, a white woman who served as a school matron at the youth facility to which Williams had been committed. ![]() 33 had died on death row other than by execution (8.1%). 181 remained on death row (44.4%), including 28 whose convictions or death sentences had been overturned but who were awaiting further court proceedings. Of those, 191 had subsequently been resentenced to life or less or released (46.8%), including 169 resentenced to life (41.4%) 16 resentenced to a term of years (3.9%) and 6 exonerated (1.5%). The Reading Eagle reported in June 2016 that from the time the Commonwealth enacted its current death penalty statute in September 1978 through 2015, Pennsylvania had sentenced 408 prisoners to death. It is now the country’s fifth largest death row. The Commonwealth’s death row has declined steadily in size from 246 in October 2001 to 175 in July 2016, without any executions, primarily as a result of death sentences being overturned in the courts and defendants being resentenced to life or less or acquitted. Only three executions have actually been carried out since reinstatement in 1976 despite the size of the state’s death row, which for more than two decades was the fourth largest in the nation. Prior to 1976, Pennsylvania carried out 1,040 executions, the third highest number of any state. Pennsylvania passed a law in 1990 that changed the method of execution from electrocution to lethal injection, the current means of execution. The last prisoner executed by means of the electric chair was Elmo Smith in 1962. ![]() Between 19, there were 350 executions in Pennsylvania, including two women. In 1913, the state’s capital punishment statute was amended to bring executions under the administration of the state rather than individual counties, and also changed the method of execution to electrocution. to outlaw public executions and move the gallows to county prisons. In 1834, Pennsylvania became the first state in the U.S. Pennsylvania began carrying out executions in the early 1600s in the form of public hangings.
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