Molly Delahunty, a third year Philosophy and Women’s Studies student at Vassar College, shared her summer’s research on August 6. Her presentation, The Role of White Womanhood in Rape Executions, Anti-Lynching Activism, and the Prevention of Lynching, detailed Delahunty’s in-depth report on the State’s use of the death penalty for rape. She examined several aspects of capital punishment, including its nature compared with forms of extra-judicial racial violence, the gendered and racialized constructions of rape, and existing scholarship on the intersection of race, sexual violence, and capital punishment.

Delahunty focused on cases from Georgia during the first half of the 20^th century, during which 95% of rape executions in the state, she said, were of Black men and boys. She spoke of two cases, the 1908 execution of Neal Ryals, and the 1937 execution of Will Hopkins. Both Black men were accused of raping white women. The consideration of these executions as legal lynchings was debated by the group gathered in Dockser Hall. It was noted that authorities at the time often advocated for capital punishment to avoid growing backlash against unofficial lynch mobs.

The last of these summer sessions was hosted by Sindhu Iyengar ’27 and Maya Quirk ’26, on August 20.

They spent the summer working on a number of CRRJ projects, but presented their research into two cases and the possibility of posthumous exoneration in each.

Iyengar presented the case of John Goss, executed in 1923, while Quirk discussed the case of Clyde Brown, executed in 1952. Both Black men were convicted of raping white women in North Carolina. Both students weighed the arguments for and against a posthumous exoneration case with respect to Goss and Brown.