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 individual--and the last--ever 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 age of nine, he found himself an orphan and was raised by his older brothers. In his...