lynch law

The punishment of persons suspected of crime without due process of law.

[After William Lynch (1742–1820).]

WORD HISTORY   In the late 18th century, Pittsylvania County, Virginia, was troubled by criminals who could not be dealt with by the courts, which were too distant. This led to an agreement to punish such criminals without due process of law. Both the practice and the punishment came to be called lynch law after Captain William Lynch, who drew up a compact on September 22, 1780, with a group of his neighbors. Arguing that Pittsylvania had “sustained great and intolerable losses by a set of lawless men … that … have hitherto escaped the civil power with impunity,” they agreed to respond to reports of criminality in their neighborhood by “repair[ing] immediately to the person or persons suspected … and if they will not desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporeal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained.” Although lynch law and lynching are mainly associated with hanging, other, less severe punishments were used. William Lynch died in 1820, and the inscription on his grave notes that “he followed virtue as his truest guide.” But the good captain, who had tried to justify vigilante justice, was sentenced to the disgrace of having given his name to the terrible practice of lynching.

If we Americans think "the courts are slow, uncertain, and unduly sympathetic with the rights of the accused," as one author wrote in 1905, what do we do about it? Nowadays we petition our legislators for stricter laws and our courts and police for stricter law enforcement. Until recently, however, our nation was notorious for quite a different solution to the problem, one that avoided the law entirely.

Lynch's law, lynch law, or just plain lynching, as it is now known, had its birth on the Virginia frontier in the 1780s during the American Revolution. It was named either after Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania County or after Colonel Charles Lynch of Bedford County. It could well have been named for both, because both men independently organized their neighbors to defend their property against outlaws and disgruntled pro-British Tories. Both Lynch organizations not only captured suspicious characters but gave them fair trials and punished them if convicted. The punishment at Charles's court was usually thirty-nine lashes.

As the frontier moved westward over the course of the next century, lynch law moved with it. At first, lynching sometimes meant bringing together the citizens of a community to hear a case and mete out punishment, and the punishment was rarely capital. But in the later nineteenth century, lynching usually meant mob action and death by hanging or even burning. And it was not confined to the frontier; lynchings took place in every part of the country except New England. While members of all races were lynched, lynching was particularly hard on blacks in the South, who had little recourse to the law; some three thousand were lynched between 1880 and 1960. Only then, with the success of the civil rights movement, did the practice finally die out.

The punishment of supposed criminals, especially by hanging, by agreement of a crowd and without a genuine criminal trial. Lynch law was used in the early settlement of the West as a way of maintaining minimal law and order before a sheriff and courts could be set up. It has also been used to deprive unpopular suspects of their rights and to satisfy a mob's thirst for vengeance. Lynch law was often used by whites in the South to terrorize and subjugate blacks.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the practice of punishing people by hanging without due process of law