This week in 1962

A circled passage in the section “He Is Sentenced to Death,” in Plato’s “Apology”:
“The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways,
I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

— James Dukes, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed August 24, 1962

Dukes was executed for killing Detective John Blyth Sr., who had pursued him after he had beaten his girlfriend in church and shot two other men who tried to stop him. On Dukes’s execution day, Detective Daniel Rolewicz, who took part in the final gun battle, told a newspaperman, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this night.”

Dukes made no oral statement but left behind a copy of the “Apology” for the press.