Hughie Sing, aged nineteen, one of the pair nabbed for the Mina killing, had attended grammar school in Carson City, and authorities persuaded him to cooperate. Although he weighed only 105 pounds, he claimed to have been a member of the Hop Sing Tong and an underling in crime to an older and larger accomplice, Gee Jon.4
Gee understood little English, having emigrated from Canton around 1907 and having lived ever since within the confines of San Francisco’s Chinatown.5 Although the cops had no hard evidence against them nor any apparent motive, the Reno police chief managed to convince Hughie to confess and implicate his associate, which the youth did in damning detail. Afterward, the pair were transported back to Mina to be held awaiting trial. An intermediary from San Francisco, W. H. Chang, arranged for them to hire a local lawyer, James M. Frame, to represent both men (something that would not be allowed before American courts today due to a conflict of interest).6 The district attorney, Jay Henry White (an active military official), and Sheriff Fred Balzar (who was also chairman of the Nevada Republican Party), mounted a withering prosecution.
Without question, race played a central role in the case. Many white Nevadans at the time harbored considerable prejudice against Asians, and the local press referred to the defendants as “Chinese coolies,” demanding that the state make an example of the Chinese tongs from San Francisco who had brought their murderous ways to peace-loving Nevada.7 Hughie tried to recant his confession, but his fate was sealed. After a brief trial, on December 3, 1921, a jury convicted the two men of first-degree murder. Judge J. Emmett Walsh sentenced both to death, making them the first defendants eligible for execution under the world’s first lethal-gas statute.8
The special nature of the case, especially the required imposition of a new method of legal execution, ensured there would be lengthy appeals, and besides, no death apparatus had yet been put into place to carry out the gassings. Their lawyer moved for a new trial, but his motion was denied, after which he prepared an appeal in state supreme court, arguing that execution by lethal gas constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution.9 Whether the punishment thus inflicted was “cruel” was open to debate, a writer for the New York Times commented, “but that it is ‘unusual’ seems undeniable. Is it therefore unconstitutional? The counsel of the condemned Nevadans say it is, but the electric chair also was ‘unusual’ a few years ago, and yet it has come and remained with the sanction of the courts.”10 Until the courts could sort this out, their executions were delayed, pending the outcome of the appeals. In January 1923 the state court affirmed the convictions and held that execution by lethal gas was not cruel and unusual punishment.11 To satisfy the Constitution, one commentator observed, all that was needed was for the gas chamber to be “modern and scientific.”12
Frame filed another appeal in state supreme court, which was also denied. So he and his partner, Fiore Raffetto, applied for a writ of certiorari in the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, on multiple grounds.13 But these actions, too, went nowhere.14 As a last resort, the legal team presented a petition for a writ of error to Associate Justice Joseph McKenna and then to Chief Justice William Howard Taft of the U.S. Supreme Court, but they refused to permit the petition to be filed, indicating that the nation’s highest court wished to wash its hands of the matter of death by lethal gas.15
Eventually the lawyers appealed to the state board of pardons to spare the lives of the two condemned men, arguing that there were mitigating factors and adding, “We feel the extreme penalty should not be exacted and think that commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment would fully vindicate the law and subserve public good and avoid the horror of taking human life by administration of lethal gas, a new and untried method.”16 To support their campaign they gathered more than five hundred letters of support from prominent citizens and civic organizations, including the League of Women Voters in Reno, and sent them in to the pardon board and newspapers.17
With Boyle gone from the governor’s office in 1922, Nevada’s new chief executive was another Democrat, James G. Scrugham, the former state engineer. His opponents called him “Gasoline Jimmy.” Scrugham had served in the war as a lieutenant colonel in the army reserves. He was also one of the founders of the American Legion, of which he had served as the national vice commander in 1920, a position that had put him in close contact with General Amos Fries, Senator Key Pittman, and representatives of the American Chemical Society.18
Years earlier, one of Scrugham’s political rivals had been acting governor Denver S. Dickerson, a fellow Democrat, Spanish-American War veteran, and former staff member at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, who represented a Colorado-based contingent in Nevada politics. Since leaving the governor’s office and later holding the position of inspector of pharmacies, in late December 1923 Dickerson had been serving as warden of the state prison in Carson City, where all of Nevada’s legal executions were supposed to be carried out.19 His predecessor as warden, R. B. Henrichs, had been openly opposed to capital punishment. But Dickerson was not an abolitionist. At least, not yet.
In January 1924, a third prisoner—Thomas Russell, a Mexican American convicted of murdering his sweetheart, a Native American girl named Mamie Johnny—was also scheduled to die by lethal gas within the next thirty days, unless the board of pardons acted to save his life.20 Although the Humane Execution Law had been in effect for almost three years, Warden Dickerson had made no preparations to carry out a gas execution, since the law and the death sentences were still under legal review.21 On January 7, however, Dickerson said he could have the death cell ready for the executions in early February. Although some details remained to be worked out, he said he thought all three men might be executed together, and he didn’t anticipate any problems. He expected to prepare an airtight room where the execution would be conducted in full view of the assembled witnesses. Once the sentence had been carried out, the gas would be drawn from the room and fresh air would be injected to enable a physician to enter and pronounce death.22
With the date of the pardon review fast approaching, the governor’s office began to take the necessary steps to see that the law’s requirements were met. On January 22 state officials announced that construction of the death cell was underway at the prison. Later it was revealed that five convicts had to be placed in solitary confinement—the “black hole”—after refusing to participate in the building of the death chamber.23 Some said their leaders were two members of the International Workers of the World (IWW), who had been rounded up in the Red Scare.24
Nevada’s history-making death house turned out to be extremely primitive: officials had simply converted the prison’s forty-year-old barbershop for the task. The single-story stone building was eleven feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet high. Merely a stone-and-concrete shack with a small tank and a tangle of pipes against one wall and an exhaust fan on the roof, it had a single glass window on each side and an oval one in the back, as well as two windows and a door in front.25 The main renovation consisted of filling in noticeable cracks to prevent the poison gas from leaking out.