Let no guilty man escape: a judicial biography of Isaac C. Parker

Abstract

Presiding from 1875 to 1896 over the United States Court for the Western Judicial District of Arkansas, Isaac Charles Parker attained notoriety as the "Hanging Judge" who brought law and order to the Indian Territory. Popular accounts have portrayed him as a jurist driven relentlessly by a Biblical sense of justice to administer absolute authority over a lawless jurisdiction inhabited by bold outlaws. Battling for twenty-one years against crime in a sprawling, 74,000-square-mile bailiwick, he sent 79 convicted killers and rapists to the gallows. But such an image was incomplete. An ambitious attorney who used the law as a vehicle for personal and political advancement, Isaac Parker from a frontier town to the halls of Congress within nine years. When Reconstruction-era politics denied him continued progress, he accepted a judicial appointment that promised even greater recognition. Although Judge Parker initially exercised great power from the Western District bench, with executive clemency the only effective recourse from his sentences for fourteen years, such authority never was absolute. Justice Department officials restricted the infamous public hangings, while communications, pardons, and Supreme Court rulings prevented nearly half of the ordered executions. The majority of criminals who appeared before him were not fearless desperadoes, but petty whiskey dealers. And although Parker considered himself a supporter of Indian rights, he consistently ruled against Native American sovereignty in civil decisions. During the 1880's, congressional advocates of judicial reform and expanded settlement steadily reduced both his jurisdiction and his powers, prompting stormy confrontations between Parker and his superiors. After 1889, when the U.S. Supreme Court gained authority to reverse his sentence, Judge Parker became increasingly belligerent, stubbornly refusing to adapt to the evolution of American legal practice while unavailingly attacking high court decisions and Justice Department officials. On September 1, 1896 his authority over the Indian Country expired; Isaac Parker died within weeks, his health wrecked by twenty-one years of overwork.