Last Hanging in Texas: Nathan Lee and the 1923 Law

The last hanging in Texas was carried out on August 31, 1923, when Brazoria County sheriff’s deputies hanged Nathan Lee in the jail yard at Angleton before a crowd of about 150 people.¹ Within months the Texas Legislature stripped counties of execution authority, abolished hanging as a method, and moved every execution behind the walls of the state penitentiary at Huntsville.

Nathan Lee’s Execution in Brazoria County

Lee, an African American sharecropper, had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Brazoria County.¹ On the morning of Friday, August 31, 1923, the county sheriff carried out the hanging in the jail yard at the county seat. Standing on the scaffold, Lee reportedly told the crowd, “I did it. I am to blame, and no one else.”²

The hanging followed the same pattern that had played out in Texas counties for more than a hundred years: the local sheriff managed every detail, from constructing the gallows to springing the trap. No county would do it again.

How County Hangings Worked Before 1923

From 1819 onward, the responsibility for carrying out death sentences in Texas fell on individual counties rather than the state. Sheriffs or their deputies personally conducted each hanging, and the condemned remained in county custody right up to execution day.¹ The 1879 Code of Criminal Procedure required gallows to be erected within county jail grounds and limited the audience to a small group of property owners, physicians, and justices of the peace. If a county had no proper jail, the sheriff was expected to find the most private location available.

Privacy was hard to enforce. Large crowds regularly showed up to watch, and sheriffs sometimes struggled to keep order. The code gave sheriffs the authority to appoint citizens or militia to keep mobs from storming the site, whether to rescue the condemned or to lynch him.¹ The gap between what the law required and what actually happened fueled pressure to take execution authority away from counties entirely.

The 1923 Law That Ended Local Hangings

Governor Pat Neff signed the bill that ended county executions in 1923. Passed during the Second Called Session of the 38th Texas Legislature as Senate Bill 63, it did three things at once: it prohibited public executions, stripped counties of execution responsibility, and abolished hanging as a method of death.³ Everyone awaiting execution would be housed at the Huntsville Unit of the state penitentiary, and every execution would take place there behind prison walls.¹

What Replaced Hanging

Senate Bill 63 made electrocution the state’s method of execution. Texas commissioned a wooden electric chair that became known as “Old Sparky,” reportedly built by a prison inmate who had himself been convicted of murder before winning a reversal on appeal.⁴

The chair was put to use quickly. On February 8, 1924, less than six months after Lee’s hanging, Texas carried out five electrocutions in a single morning at Huntsville, beginning with Charles Reynolds of Red River County. Over the next four decades, 361 people died in Old Sparky. The last electrocution in Texas was that of Joseph Johnson of Harris County on July 30, 1964.⁴ The chair is now preserved at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville.

A nationwide legal moratorium then paused executions. When the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to resume them in the mid-1970s, Texas did not go back to the electric chair. In 1977, the state adopted lethal injection, becoming one of the first to do so.⁴ Executions have continued at the Huntsville Unit ever since, the same facility the 1923 law designated as the state’s sole execution site.

1
Texas State Historical Association. Capital Punishment in Texas
2
Wikipedia. List of People Executed in Texas, 1920-1929
3
Texas Archival Resources Online. Texas Department of Criminal Justice Death Row Historical Files
4
Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Death Row Information