Crime-Weary Public Fondly Recalls Whipping-Post Days

NEW CASTLE, Del. - A museum exhibit designed to show the cruelty of Delaware's whipping post - last used in 1952 - found instead that the punishment known as "Hugging Red Hannah" still has a certain appeal.

"I think it's an indication of frustration . . . with the ineffectiveness of our criminal-justice system," Kathy Bratton, executive director of the New Castle Historical Society, said of museum-goers' reaction. "They see crime rates rising and see it in their neighborhoods, and they're ready to try anything."

"If they saw an actual whipping, I wonder if they would feel the same way," she said.

Whipping was outlawed in Delaware in 1972. In the book "Red Hannah," author Robert Caldwell estimated that about 1,600 men were flogged in Delaware from about 1900 to 1940. The punishment was last used on a woman in the 1870s.

Whipping came to be called "Hugging Red Hannah" because the whipping post in New Castle was painted red and the offender's arms were shackled around it while the sentence of lashes "well laid on" was carried out.

The exhibit at the Old Library Museum includes a 15-foot replica of Red Hannah - 2 feet shorter than the original - as well as the white whipping post used in Dover, Delaware's capital, its sides worn down from years of "hugging."

There are pictures of public floggings; of men, stripped to the waist, tied to the posts; and of men in a double pillory atop one whipping post. Display cases hold cat-o'-nine-tails.

Bratton designed the exhibit to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.

Harry Themal, a columnist at The News Journal in Wilmington, witnessed Delaware's last whipping in 1952. Not only should flogging be resurrected but violent criminals should be whipped in public, he said.

Flogging applied to dozens of crimes. The last man was whipped for breaking into a house and beating a woman. Themal said a warden started at the man's neck and worked the whip down the man's back and up again.

"There was blood. Not as much as I would have thought," Themal said. "I was not overwhelmed emotionally. Sure, I felt a little knot in my stomach but I was not completely revolted, either."

Jerome Unruh, a former state representative, sponsored a bill in 1969 to mandate flogging for robbery and assault with intent to rob. At the time, the punishment was a $300 fine or 20 lashes.

The bill failed, and later that year then-Gov. Russell Peterson ordered whipping posts removed from the state's three county jails.

The practice of flogging was officially outlawed when the state's criminal code was revised 19 years ago.

Even then, there was "no tremendous public pressure to take away whipping as a punishment," said Superior Court Judge Jerome Herlihy, then Delaware's chief deputy attorney general.

In 1989, state Sen. Tom Sharpe introduced a bill to whip drug offenders, but the bill never came up for a vote. Sharpe said then that he sponsored the bill mainly to draw attention to Delaware's drug problems.