The old courthouse at San Patricio

Texas · USA · Execution site

Josefa Chipita Rodriguez is the only woman ever legally hanged in Texas. The state exonerated her a hundred and twenty two years later.

Chipita Rodriguez lived in a shack on the Aransas River in Texas, where she cooked for travellers and let them sleep on cots on her porch.

When a trader named John Savage was killed with an axe and his six hundred dollars in gold went missing, she was the suspect. The gold was later recovered from the river. She was tried at San Patricio in 1863, convicted on evidence that would not survive five minutes today, and hanged, despite the jury itself recommending mercy.

She is the only woman ever legally executed by the state of Texas.

In 1985 the Texas legislature passed a resolution formally absolving her of the murder.

What is reported at the old courthouse is her. It should be read as what it is: a poor woman on the Texas frontier who was hanged for something the state itself later accepted she did not do.

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Wo befindet sich The old courthouse at San Patricio?

The old courthouse at San Patricio liegt in Texas, USA.