Murder or physical violence committed by a crowd of indignant people is a current phenomenon at all times. There are many such cases today. For this, the victim only needs to cause anger in society by a crime, misconduct, or simply become an object of manipulation by public consciousness. Then he can become a victim of reprisals without trial and investigation, that is, without the participation of the law.
In the US, this phenomenon has even received its own term - "lynching". Wikipedia today interprets lynching as a murder without trial and investigation of a person who is suspected of any crime or simply violating established rules in society.
As a rule, in the event of the harshest sentence, people who were lynched were hanged, less often after torture they were burned at the stake. But in fairness, it must be said that many were simply destroyed morally. They were rolled in feathers, after having smeared the naked body with tar, after which they were put in a barrel and taken around the city. Relevant comments and hooting of the crowd were inseparable attributes of such an action.
Now, actually, why such a name. It came from the definition of "lynching", and this is the name of a specific person, which makes you look deep into history. It just so happened that in the United States, two historical characters named Lynch were tried according to their own laws.
One of them - civil judge Charles Lynch administered justice during the Revolutionary War, and this is the last quarter of the 18th century. He personally decided the fate of suspects in military and criminal offenses. To take a person's life, he did not need prosecutors, lawyers or any other people.
History also knows Colonel William Lynch, who served in Pennsylvania. In 1780, he introduced the "law of lynch" here, which, although it provided for extrajudicial executions, but it was corporal punishment.
Thus, one of the two Lynches, and perhaps both at once, claim the origin of the term, which denoted a rather long and destructive process for thousands of people in American history. In the United States, for example, the last known case of lynching dates back to 1981. It happened in the city of Mobile, Alabama. Then the members of the Ku Klux Klan killed a young black guy named Michael Donald.
However, for the local clan, this meant the beginning of the end. The police found the perpetrators, the court sentenced them to pay the relatives of the murdered $ 7 million and transfer various property into possession. The direct killer of Henry Francis Hayes was sentenced to death by the court, which was carried out in 1997.
But for many years the official government of the United States, although publicly condemned lynching, nevertheless, did not stop it. Moreover, the sheriffs of the territories, mayors of cities and other officials have participated in the lynching courts. Of course, under these conditions, no one was involved in the investigation of murders committed without trial or investigation.
Well, history has left vivid and very sad facts about how the crowd ruled its court not only with the inaction of the official authorities, but even in spite of its own verdicts.
An example of this is the case of Leo Frank, the manager of a pencil factory in Georgia. He was charged with bodily harm, rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl working in a factory. It happened in 1913.
At first, the court sentenced Frank to death, but after listening to lawyers who considered the evidence base very weak, State Governor John Slayton commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment.
This decision caused a sharp outrage among the residents of Atlanta, the capital of Georgia. As a result, the governor, forced to resign, lost his position, and Leo Frank lost his life.
He was sent to serve a life sentence relatively near Atlanta, to the prison in the city of Milledgeville, 130 km away.from the capital of Georgia. On August 17, 1915, an angry mob of Atlanta and Milledgeville residents broke into a local prison and took Leo Frank to an oak grove near the girl's grave.
There he was asked to admit his guilt, but he denied it. Then Frank was hanged from a tree. The next day the police took him out of the noose, but no charges were brought against anyone.
There is a misconception that dark-skinned state citizens were lynched. But this is not the case and the case of the Jew Leo Frank is proof of this. Yes, African Americans are more likely than others to go through the lynching, but it was carried out in relation to Italians, Mexicans, French, English-speaking Catholics and other representatives of non-African peoples.
In cases where the mood in society did not coincide with the opinion of the official justice.
