By J.L. MILLER
Dover Bureau reporter
07/03/2003

Delaware's gallows will be dismantled Tuesday and the pieces discarded, closing a grim chapter in the state's history.
Correction Commissioner Stanley W. Taylor Jr. reached the decision after determining that no historical institution was interested in preserving the wooden structure, department spokeswoman Beth Welch said Wednesday.
Wood from the gallows will be disposed of in a way that will keep it from being scavenged by souvenir hunters, she said.
The gallows at the Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna were used only once, when Billy Bailey was executed Jan. 25, 1996, for the 1979 murder of an elderly Cheswold couple.
The gallows were constructed in 1986, when Bailey was one of several inmates who had been sentenced under the old death-penalty law that prescribed hanging as the method of execution. Delaware changed the method to lethal injection in 1986.
James W. Riley, convicted in the 1982 slaying of a Dover liquor store owner, was the last inmate eligible to be hanged.
A federal appeals court overturned Riley's conviction, and his retrial and subsequent life sentence handed down May 19 rendered the gallows obsolete.
Barbara Benson, outgoing director of the Historical Society of Delaware, said last month that while the gallows could be considered a historical artifact, the structure would not be appropriate for the society's collection.
However, other institutions have preserved gallows and related artifacts.
The Museum of Colorado Prisons, located in a former prison in Caņon City, Colo., not only displays the last hangman's noose used in an execution there but the gas chamber, as well.
"You have to understand that a lot of things that we exhibit at this museum are not meant to make people feel good," Michelle Roberts, museum employee, said. "They were meant to educate people on what it was like to be in prison, how we've come from the extremely harsh to the more humane.
"We simply exhibit the facts. Not to exhibit something like the gas chamber would be not telling the truth."
Reach J.L. Miller at 678-4271 or jlmiller@delawareonline.com.