takenoprizners

[takenoprizners]

December 29, 1944, Waynesboro, Mississippi: 19-year-old AWOL US Navy sailors Joseph Leemon and Murice Shimniok (frequently misspelled as Maurice) were electrocuted in Mississippi's portable electric chair in completion of death sentences for the murder of former county sheriff Tom Boykin thirteen months earlier. It was the practice in Mississippi to execute condemned prisoners in the same courthouse where they had been convicted. Wayne County jail authorities granted a request from the two youths to prepare each other for the electric chair. Life Magazine was granted access to the jail and permitted to photograph the final hours of the two friends. The macabre photo essay appeared in the January 29, 1945 issue of Life. (Mississippi newspapers, especially The Meridian Star, also covered the executions extensively, without photographs.) Leemon was the first of the two to die. Shimniok was taken to the chair a short time afterward. According to the report in The Meridian Star, as he entered the courtroom where he would be executed, Shimniok asked a guard "How did Joe go?" to which the officer replied "Like a man." The executioner for both men was H. W. Watson.

The parents of both young men had traveled to Waynesboro from Wisconsin and Alabama to claim the bodies of their sons. They had acquired coffins for transport of remains back to their hometowns. The parents discovered initially that their sons had been placed in the wrong caskets. The confusion was resolved after the corpses were switched. Murice Shimniok is buried in Minona, Wisconsin. Joseph Leemon's grave is in Bamford, Alabama.

Watt Espy, Jr., was a tireless researcher and compiler of data on executions in the US. His archive is still an important resource and is included in the National Death Penalty Archive. As was his custom, prior to his eventual use of digital media, Espy recorded the Leemon-Shimniok executions on note cards (Case No. B20_MS).

Mississippi utilized the traveling electric chair between 1940 and 1954, moving the device from county to county for local electrocutions in the place where the death sentence had been issued. A group of schoolboys poses here together with the death chair and executioner Jimmy Thompson, on the left. (Thompson was not the executioner for Joseph Leemon and Murice Shimniok.) The state discontinued its use of the mobile electric chair in 1954, when a gas chamber became operational in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

[takenoprizners]

°

[takenoprizners]

Interlocking anatomy_1

[takenoprizners]

Art for autumn_1

[takenoprizners]

While the aluminum bat has its advantages, most players swing wood.

[takenoprizners]

[takenoprizners]

Halloween humor_1

[takenoprizners]

Hollywood Halloween_1

[takenoprizners]

Pumpkin guys_1

[takenoprizners]

October passings: Christopher Reeve, 10 Oct. 2004; Jon-Erik Hexum, 18 Oct. 1984; Joel McCrea, 20 Oct. 1990; Ramon Novarro, 30 Oct. 1968.

[takenoprizners]

Fence sitters_1

[takenoprizners]

Succulents.

[takenoprizners]

Fight your bro_5

[takenoprizners]

That frantic search of every pocket, when you realize you may have left home without your mobile.

[takenoprizners]

Photographer: Arthur Tress. 1994.

[takenoprizners]

Archer aiming at the Sun, 2004. David Ligare, American painter - b.1945.

[takenoprizners]

Men and swords_2