Austin Nelson and Eugene LaMoore

Austin Archibald Nelson (October 1, 1918 – March 1, 1948) and Eugene R. LaMoore (February 22, 1904 – April 14, 1950) were the last two people to be judicially executed in the Territory of Alaska. Nelson and LaMoore were both convicted in separate trials of the December 1946 murder of Jim Ellen, a grocery store owner from Alaska's capital of Juneau, committed during a robbery of Ellen's store. Nelson's trial took place in 1947, and LaMoore testified in defense of Nelson's alibi before authorities connected him to Ellen's murder as well, leading to his own trial and conviction in 1948. Both men were sentenced to death. While Nelson was the second-to-last person executed in Alaska's history, LaMoore's execution two years later designated him as the final person to be executed in Alaska's history, as the then-territory abolished the death penalty in 1957 and never reinstated capital punishment after statehood in 1959.

Decades after their convictions, several legal historians and journalists, including Averil Lerman, Ed Schoenfeld, and Betsy Longenbaugh, retrospectively analyzed the condemned men's cases. Lerman found their trials to have been "riddled with misconduct and errors", and Lerman specifically said prosecutorial misconduct played a role in both Nelson's trial and LaMoore's subsequent trial. Lerman also stated that the executions of Nelson and LaMoore were emblematic of a pattern of racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty in Alaska, as Lerman identified that racial minorities, impoverished defendants, and defendants lacking access to adequate legal representation received comparatively harsher punishments than white defendants and wealthier defendants; Nelson and LaMoore were both African-American men. Lerman and Logenbaugh also posited that the controversy surrounding Nelson's and LaMoore's executions contributed to souring public perception against the death penalty in Alaska, leading to the institution's abolition seven years after LaMoore's hanging.

Background The murder victim, Jim Ellen, was a native of Greece. During his childhood, in 1909, he immigrated to the United States. Ellen was 53 years old at the time of his murder and had previously been married; his wife preceded him in death. Ellen was a World War I veteran, a member of the American Legion, and a member of the Juneau-based chapter of the Elks Lodge. Ellen moved to Juneau in approximately 1925. His store had been targeted in prior robbery attempts, including in 1937, 1938, and 1944, one of which involved Ellen fighting back against two armed men attempting to rob his store and successfully chasing them away following a physical altercation.

Austin Nelson was a laborer from Juneau, although he was initially born in New Orleans. Nelson did odd jobs around Juneau. Nelson was Catholic. At the time of his trial and execution, he was in his 40s and married to a woman from Tlingit Nation. The couple had at least three children.

Murder, investigation, and arrest On December 22, 1946, Jim Ellen's body was found in the rear living quarters of his grocery and liquor store in Juneau. His throat had been slashed, and Ellen reportedly had a large sum of money that was unaccounted for after the murder. Locals stated Jim Ellen's murder "hit a nerve" because the crime conjured up anxieties and suspicions about the many strangers and drifters around Juneau in the post-war era. Two days after Ellen's robbery and killing, authorities charged Nelson with first degree murder.

Nelson was appointed two attorneys ten days before his trial was scheduled to begin in April 1947. His first attorney was Henry Roden, who was in his 70s and was reportedly "too frail" to make the walk to the local jail to visit Nelson. His second attorney, Joseph McLean, had passed the bar examination two months prior to his appointment onto Nelson's case and was relatively inexperienced with law. During their investigation, the FBI, who conducted the probe into the case, considered covertly recording conversations between Nelson and his attorney due to his attorney experiencing hearing loss and therefore speaking loudly. A laboratory in Washington, D.C. advised against it.

Eugene LaMoore's trial

Investigation and arrest During Nelson's trial, LaMoore was asked on the stand if he had any aliases, and he responded affirmatively. Prosecutors then asked him if he had a criminal record of prior felonies, and he responded that he did not have one; in reality, he had a prior robbery conviction stemming from a 1927 case in California, as well as a prior conviction in Juneau in January 1944 for selling alcohol without a license. The second conviction required LaMoore to pay a fine of $600 USD, and he was also given a suspended sentence of six months in prison. LaMoore gave his dishonest answer during one day of testimony and was called into court the next day to amend his testimony. After he gave his updated testimony, the FBI and Deputy US Marshal Walter G. Hellan arrested him for perjury and held him in the Federal Jail in Juneau on US$10,000 bond. Authorities then arranged for Nelson and LaMoore to meet in jail; at that point, Nelson was scheduled to be executed on July 1, 1947. Less than 24 hours prior to Nelson's scheduled execution, LaMoore submitted a typed confession admitting to involvement in Ellen's robbery, albeit stating that Nelson had committed the murder against LaMoore's wishes and that LaMoore only learned of the murder after exiting the store. During their deliberations, jurors submitted a note asking the judge to determine LaMoore's sentence, and the judge replied that determining a sentence was their responsibility. After five hours of deliberations, the jury returned with a guilty verdict and sentenced LaMoore to death.

Soon after receiving his death sentence, LaMoore pleaded for executive clemency from Alaska's acting territorial governor, Llewellyn Morris "Lew" Williams. In April 1948, Governor Williams announced he would not offer LaMoore executive clemency, which would have reduced LaMoore's sentence to life imprisonment. At the time, LaMoore was scheduled to be hanged on April 30, 1948, but he was able to appeal, postponing the execution of his sentence.

LaMoore appealed his death sentence on the grounds that his confession was illegally obtained and involuntary and, therefore, he deserved a new trial due to his trial's judge not sustaining his objection or approving his motion to strike. On January 13, 1950, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld his conviction and death sentence.

Executions Less than a week after the conclusion of LaMoore's trial, Nelson's execution was scheduled to take place on March 1, 1948. Witnesses to Nelson's execution stated that he fought guards on his way to the gallows and left Deputy U.S. Marshal Sidney Thompson with a black eye. After the trap door dropped at 5:40 am, Nelson took approximately 11 minutes to die. Nelson's execution was under federal jurisdiction because of Alaska's status as a territory, which meant that federal officials presided over the execution.

Aftermath, analysis, abolition In May 1950, one month after LaMoore's execution, LaMoore's five-year-old son Gene accidentally shot and killed his three-year-old sister Yvonne with a rifle. LaMoore's wife placed their remaining children into an orphanage and died at a relatively young age. LaMoore's sister adopted two of their children, but authorities denied her request to adopt a third because, unlike LaMoore's sister, who was black, the third child's skin was light enough for her to pass as white.

Anchorage, Alaska-based attorney and historian Averil Lerman noted that there were "many other homicides in Juneau and Southeast Alaska" between 1939 – the year Alaska hanged Nelson Charles, a Native American man – and 1950, yet none of the perpetrators aside from Charles, Nelson, and LaMoore were executed. In one particular case, a white man named George Meeks was convicted of the 1948 robbery and murder of a construction worker in a trial overseen by Robert Boochever, one of the same prosecutors who had obtained death sentences against Nelson and LaMoore, but Meeks was sentenced to life imprisonment; in a 1995 interview with Lerman, Boochever stated his belief that Meeks would have been hanged if he had been black like Nelson and LaMoore.

In 2018, Logenbaugh and Ed Schoenfeld, both of whom were Juneau-based journalists, organized a tour called "Capital City Killers" focusing on crime in Juneau. The tour designated the Juneau-Douglas City Museum as the tour's first stop because the museum was to serve as a stand-in for the location where Nelson and LaMoore were hanged.