Search

This series features administrative records of Watt Espy's efforts to chronicle every government-sanctioned execution in the United States as part of his Capital Punishment Research Project. Espy was the only full-time employee of this organization although he worked with paid graduate assistants while at the University of Alabama School of Law.

The Watt Espy subject files contain a variety of materials that supplement information in the other series without necessarily being directly related. Researchers will find background information on the history of capital punishment, death penalty statistics, and a few files on crime in general. There are folders devoted to crime and punishment in many individual states and territories, though not all of them are represented. The subject files also contain information on the various methods of execution employed across the country, mainly hanging, gassing, electrocution, and lethal injection. Additionally, there are death penalty-related topics such as physician participation, editorial pieces dealing with ethics of capital punishment, execution of prisoners with low IQs, background materials on the death penalty in early America, and a few assorted death penalty research projects that Espy followed. There are also assorted photos, many of which feature inmates and prisons. Images of identified and unidentified individuals executed are presumed to be the ones that filled the walls of Espy's house.

Watt Espy sent and received a significant amount of correspondence as part of his work on the Capital Punishment Research Project. The majority of correspondence, however, was not organized when it arrived at the University at Albany. The archivists elected to arrange it into two groups: files devoted to prominent or regular correspondents, and general correspondence. The former includes key academics (Michael Radelet, Hugo Bedeau, Margaret Vandiver), attorneys (The California Appellate Project, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Ohio Public Defender's Office), death penalty abolitionists and advocacy group executives (Rev. Joe Ingle, Sister Helen Prejean, Henry Schwarzschild), prominent prisoners and their families (Kerry Max Cook, Gary McGivern), and researchers who frequently corresponded with Espy. There were also a small number of files that Espy organized by subject, such as letters to and from prisoners, telephone inquiries, or correspondence relating to executions in a particular state, and the archivists retained this order and kept the files in the first group. The second group includes more infrequent correspondents, usually general inquiries sent to libraries or archives for records relating to individuals executed or for research requests.