This week in 1933

“It looks pretty dark, but if I have to, I guess I can take my
medicine.”

— Morris Cohen, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed October 13, 1933

A thirty-eight-year-old barber, Cohen got the electric chair for the murder of Officer Joseph Hastings during a robbery attempt at Chicago’s Navy Pier. A secondary headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune read “Record for Speedy Justice Is Set.” He had been executed less than two months after the crime.