M. Watt Espy Jr. (1933-2009) was widely recognized as one of the foremost historians of legal executions in the United States. Beginning with his own personal resources, in May 1970, Espy began the first quest to chronicle and document over 15,000 government sanctioned executions in the United States since 1608; an effort that formally became the Capital Punishment Research Project. His method was to collect information by obtaining state Department of Corrections records, newspapers, published and unpublished county histories, proceedings of state and local courts, magazines, and holdings of historical societies, libraries, museums, and archives. Initially Espy accumulated and recorded information about executions in the United States from his home in Headland, Alabama. Between 1977 and 1985, however, the University of Alabama Law Center hired Espy to continue his work and during this time he published "Capital Punishment and Deterrence: What the Statistics Cannot Show" in Crime and Delinquency in 1980. He also wrote numerous opinion editorials and histories of the death penalty for major daily newspapers throughout the 1980s. In 1984, the National Science Foundation awarded a grant to support the preparation of a comprehensive computer database with Espy's exhaustive research as its foundation. In 1987, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research published a dataset, Executions in the United States, 1608-1987: The Espy File. The data file furnishes data on executions performed under civil authority in the United States between 1608 and 1987, and describes each individual executed and the circumstances surrounding the crime for which the person was convicted. The Espy file was last updated in 2002. Following his work with the University of Alabama Law Center, Espy continued to research and document executions, write and lecture form his home base in Headland until his death in 2009.
From the description of M. Watt Espy Papers, 1730-2008. (University at Albany). WorldCat record id: 779535422
