After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was cruel and unusual for the offense charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individualand the lastever to be executed for a crime of this sort. He was hanged in 1901; in a macabre ending to his life of crime, his head was torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows. Tom Ketchum was born in 1863 on a farm near the fringe of the Texas frontier. At the a