History reports that “Hanging Judge” Isaac Charles Parker sentenced 156 men (and four women) to death. The good judge, though, begged to differ. “I never hung a man,” he told a St. Louis Republic reporter. “It is the law.” Parker, who presided over the Federal Court of the Western District of Arkansas in Fort Smith for more than two decades, personally favored the abolition of capital punishment and never witnessed an execution. But putting his private misgivings aside, he sentenc


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