(Above left: Glove Staff Photo / Jonathan Wiggs; Mug Shots: Globe File Photos)

FOR MOST of its history, Massachusetts has been a death penalty state. In its early days the Commonwealth was harsher on moral crimes than property crimes. Burglary was not, as in many other places, a capital crime, but bestiality was (for both species involved). Death penalty abolitionism has a long history in the state, too, but it wasn’t until 1980 that capital punishment was outlawed by the Supreme Judicial Court. Two years later, after voters approved a state constitutional amendment explicitly allowing for the death penalty, the state House and Senate passed a new death penalty bill. But in 1984 the state’s high court struck that down as well. By that point the death penalty was already nearly symbolic. No one has been sent to the electric chair here since May 9, 1947, when Edward “Dutchy” Gertson (above, left) and Philip R. Bellino (below, left) were executed at Charlestown State Prison for the murder of Robert “Tex” Williams. Gov. Mitt Romney’s recent proposal to create a “scientific” penalty — which follows failed attempts to reinstate capital punishment in 1997 (far left) and 2000 — may end up being merely symbolic as well. —DRAKE BENNETT