Hindsight

By Timothy Sandefur

On March 3, 1893, Jose "Indian Joe" Gabriel was hanged at San Quentin State Prison for a double murder. Although county officials had executed many convicts over the years - under California's Criminal Practices Act, enacted in 1851 - Gabriel was the first person the state ever executed. This was the result of a law that two years earlier transferred responsibility for executions from county to state officials.

Charged with murdering a farm couple in the San Diego community of Otay Mesa, Gabriel narrowly escaped a lynching - the sheriff managed to scare the mob away - only to be convicted on dubious evidence after a five-day trial. Remarkably, Gabriel received the death penalty despite one juror's comment in court that he disagreed with the sentence. But Gabriel, a farmhand, could not afford an appeal, and state law at the time did not provide for automatic appeals in capital cases. More than 300 state-ordered hangings followed Gabriel's before California replaced that method of execution with the gas chamber in 1937.

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