MSNBCW The Rachel Maddow Show July 25, 2014
The day after her husbands funeral. And as unusual as it was at the time, in the 1930s, to have a woman sheriff in the United States, the reason Florence Shoemaker Thompson became nationally famous as a local county sheriff in kentucky at the time is because while she was sheriff of that county, she had to carry out a hanging. Just a few weeks after she was sworn in, an africanamerican man named Rainey Bethea was sentenced to die in davis county, kentucky, after he was convicted of raping and murdering a local white woman. He did not protest his innocence. Although he did fight his sentence. H...