davis county is where owensboro, kentucky, is. to replace him, the county planned to hold an election to pick a new sheriff, but in the meantime, they needed somebody interim. they needed somebody to fill the now suddenly vacant job of the county sheriff when the sheriff died. and a local judge decided that the most expedient thing to do would just to be ask the dead sheriff's widow if she would fill in for him after his death. her name was florence shoemaker thompson. she was asked if she would fill in and become the sheriff in her husband's absence. she said yes. she was sworn in in davis county the day after her husband's funeral. and as unusual as it was at the time, in the 1930s, to have a woman sheriff in the united states, the reason florence shoemaker thompson became nationally famous as a local county sheriff in kentucky at the time is because while she was sheriff of that county, she had to carry out a hanging. just a few weeks after she was sworn in, an african-american man named rainey bethea was sentenced to die in da

it has been 75 year since we last did that when we last did it in owensboro, kentucky. executions now still are public proceedings, right? they're an act of government. legally they can't be secret. the public has a right to know. there have to be witnesses. theoretically, at least, it's all a transparent process. you see that in granular ways. like yesterday in arizona, efforts of prison officials to kill a man at the arizona state prison complex started to go wrong. not long after they started the process of killing him. the expected 10 or 15 minutes, what everybody was expecting for the execution, it stretched on and on. 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes. more than an hour after they had injected the guy, the guy still was not dead. he was still gasping. his stomach was reportedly visibly convulsing. he was making loud sucking sounds. more than an hour into their efforts to kill him. more than an hour and a half into their efforts to kill him. in the middle of that, his lawyers called a federal judge to try to get this bungled execution stopped while the

davis county is where owensboro, kentucky, is.him, the county planned to hold an election to pick a new sheriff, but in the meantime, they needed somebody interim. they needed somebody to fill the now suddenly vacant job of the county sheriff when the sheriff died. and a local judge decided that the most expedient thing to do would just to be ask the dead sheriff's widow if she would fill in for him after his death. her name was florence shoemaker thompson. she was asked if she would fill in and become the sheriff in her husband's absence. she said yes. she was sworn in in daco