This article examines the case of Corrine Sykes, a 22-year-old African American housemaid who became the second woman in Pennsylvania to be executed in the electric chair in 1946, and explores how race, gender, politics, and chance continue to determine who lives and who dies under capital punishment 75 years later. The content is for educational and historical documentation only, based on court records, newspaper archives, and historical research.
Corrine Sykes: The Unfinished Business of Justice – 75 Years Later, Why Does Chance Still Decide Who Lives?
On a cold morning in February 1946, a 22-year-old African American housemaid named Corrine Sykes was led into the execution chamber at Rockview State Prison in central Pennsylvania. She was strapped into the state’s electric chair – the same oak chair that had taken dozens of lives before hers and would take dozens more after. When the executioner threw the switch, 2,000 volts of electricity coursed through her body. A ventilator hood sucked the smoke from her burning skin. Within minutes, she was dead.
Corrine Sykes was the second woman in Pennsylvania history to be executed. She was also young, poor, and Black. Her case raises uncomfortable questions that remain unanswered 75 years later: Why was she sentenced to death when others who committed similar crimes were not? Why did chance, race, and politics – not justice – determine her fate? And why, after three-quarters of a century, does the same unequal system still decide who lives and who dies?
This is the story of Corrine Sykes – and the unfinished business of justice in America.
1. The Crime: A Tragedy in Two Families
In early 1945, Corrine Sykes was working as a housemaid for a white family in the Philadelphia suburbs. She was, by all accounts, a quiet young woman who kept to herself. She had no prior criminal record. She had never been in serious trouble with the law.
The details of her crime are not in dispute. On February 27, 1945, Sykes went to the home of Florence and Charles Snyder in Abington Township, Montgomery County, where she had previously worked. What happened inside that home remains a subject of debate among historians, but the outcome is not: Florence Snyder, a 53-year-old white woman, was dead.
According to prosecutors, Sykes had stolen a watch from the Snyder home during her previous employment. When Mrs. Snyder confronted her about the theft, Sykes struck her with a blunt object – possibly a hammer or a piece of iron pipe – and then strangled her.
Sykes was arrested shortly after. She gave conflicting statements to police. Initially, she denied involvement. Later, she confessed. She claimed that she had not intended to kill Mrs. Snyder – that she had only wanted to retrieve the watch to avoid being turned over to authorities. But the confession sealed her fate.
2. The Trial: A Speedy Verdict
Sykes’s trial began on December 10, 1945, at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania. The proceedings lasted just two days. The jury deliberated for only two hours before returning a verdict: guilty of first-degree murder. The sentence was death.
Sykes’s court-appointed attorneys argued that she was not the actual killer – that another person had committed the murder – but the jury did not believe them. The prosecution presented the confession, which Sykes had signed, along with circumstantial evidence placing her at the scene.
What the jury did not hear – or was not told – could fill a library.
3. The Unanswered Questions: What the Jury Never Knew
Several critical pieces of information were kept from the jury during Sykes’s trial:
The Coercion Question: Sykes’s confession was obtained after hours of interrogation. There was no attorney present. There was no family member. Whether she fully understood her rights or was coerced into confessing is a question that has never been adequately answered.
The Missing Witness: There was a man with Sykes on the night of the murder – an acquaintance whose name has been lost to history. He was never called to testify. His account of what happened that night never reached the jury.
The Disputed Evidence: The murder weapon was never conclusively linked to Sykes. There were no fingerprints. There was no DNA (the technology did not exist in 1945). The case against her was built almost entirely on her confession and circumstantial evidence.
The Racial Context: The trial took place in a county where African Americans were rarely called for jury duty. The jury that convicted Sykes was composed entirely of white men. Whether a Black defendant could receive a fair trial from an all-white jury in 1945 Montgomery County is a question that answers itself.
4. The Execution: February 1946
Corrine Sykes was executed on February 28, 1946 – exactly one year and one day after Florence Snyder’s death. She was 22 years old.
The execution was not public. By 1946, Pennsylvania had long since moved executions behind prison walls. But the news leaked out, as it always did. Newspapers reported that Sykes had been “calm” in her final hours. She had no last meal. She spent her final night in prayer.
When the switch was thrown, the execution was not clean. The electric chair was an imperfect machine, and the first jolt often did not kill instantly. The ventilator hood, designed to suck the smoke from burning skin, could not hide the reality of what was happening inside that room.
Corrine Sykes was the second woman executed in Pennsylvania. The first was Mila T. (no last name recorded), who was hanged in Lancaster in 1797. No woman has been executed in Pennsylvania since.
5. The Comparison: Other Women, Other Sentences
The story of Corrine Sykes becomes even more troubling when compared to other women convicted of murder in Pennsylvania around the same time.
Consider the case of a white woman convicted of killing her abusive husband. She was sentenced to life imprisonment – not death. Consider another white woman who hired a hitman to kill her lover’s wife. She received a life sentence. Consider a third white woman who shot her husband in cold blood. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was institutionalized, not executed.
What made Corrine Sykes different? She was Black. She was poor. She had no powerful family to advocate for her. She had no money for a high-profile defense team. She was, in the eyes of the all-white jury, disposable.
This is not speculation. It is the conclusion of every study ever conducted on racial disparities in capital punishment. Black defendants – especially Black defendants accused of killing white victims – are far more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants who commit similar crimes.
6. The Politics of Execution: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Who Decides?
The story of the second woman executed in Pa. history shows why the death penalty must end | Opinion
The death penalty is not applied evenly. This is not an opinion; it is a statistical fact. A defendant’s race, the race of the victim, the quality of legal representation, the jurisdiction where the crime occurred, and even the political climate at the time of the trial can all determine whether someone lives or dies.
In 1946, Pennsylvania’s governor was Edward Martin, a Republican who had won office on a law-and-order platform. He had no political incentive to commute Sykes’s sentence. If he had been a different governor – if the election results had been different – Sykes might have lived.
Chance. Politics. Race. Geography. These factors should have nothing to do with who receives the ultimate punishment. But they do. They always have.
7. The Electric Chair: A Brutal Legacy
The electric chair used to execute Corrine Sykes was the same chair used in all Pennsylvania executions from 1915 until the state switched to lethal injection in 1990. It was a brutal device, designed to kill by passing a high-voltage current through the body.
The first jolt was intended to render the prisoner unconscious. The second jolt stopped the heart. But the process was often botched. Prisoners sometimes caught fire. Their skin sometimes burned and smoked. The ventilator hood was added to suck the smoke away – not to make the execution more humane, but to make it less gruesome for the witnesses.
Sykes was one of 350 people executed in Pennsylvania’s electric chair. The last was in 1962. The chair was retired in 1990, but Pennsylvania still has the death penalty. No one has been executed in the state since 1999, but people are still sentenced to death. They sit on death row, waiting for a governor to sign their warrant or a court to overturn their sentence.
8. The Racial Disparity: By the Numbers
The statistics on race and the death penalty are stark:
Black defendants make up approximately 40% of death row inmates in the United States, despite being only 13% of the population.
Defendants accused of killing white victims are far more likely to receive the death penalty than those accused of killing Black victims.
In Pennsylvania, a study found that Black defendants were more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as white defendants in similar cases.
The racial disparity has persisted for decades. It shows no signs of disappearing.
Corrine Sykes was not an outlier. She was a statistic – one of many Black defendants who received harsher punishment than their white counterparts.
9. The Aftermath: Forgotten History
After her execution, Corrine Sykes was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery at Rockview. Her body was not returned to her family. There was no funeral. There was no headstone.
For decades, her story was forgotten. The newspapers that covered her trial moved on to other stories. The officials who presided over her execution retired or died. The jurors who convicted her went back to their lives.
But the questions her case raised did not disappear. They lingered, unasked and unanswered, for 75 years.
10. The Reform Movement: Progress and Its Limits
In the decades since Sykes’s execution, Pennsylvania has made some progress toward a fairer death penalty. The state now provides better legal representation for indigent defendants. Courts have struck down death sentences that were tainted by racial bias. Governors have commuted death sentences.
But the system is still far from fair. Race still matters. Wealth still matters. Geography still matters. A defendant’s chance of receiving the death penalty still depends, in part, on factors that have nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
In 2021, the year this article was originally published, Pennsylvania had 102 people on death row. Most were men. Most were poor. Most were represented by overworked public defenders. And most were waiting – some for decades – to learn whether they would live or die.
11. The Unfinished Business: 75 Years Later
Seventy-five years after Corrine Sykes was executed, the question at the heart of her case remains unanswered: Why does chance still determine who lives and who dies?
The death penalty is not applied consistently. It is not applied fairly. It is not applied without regard to race, class, or geography. It is, as many legal scholars have noted, a lottery – a lottery in which the poor, the Black, and the unlucky are far more likely to lose.
If Sykes had been white, would she have been executed? If she had been wealthy, would she have been executed? If her trial had been held in a different county, with a different judge, a different prosecutor, a different jury – would the outcome have been the same?
We will never know. But the question itself is an indictment of the system that killed her.
12. Conclusion: A Debt Still Owed
Corrine Sykes was 22 years old when she died. She was young. She was poor. She was Black. And she was killed by the state of Pennsylvania.
Did she commit murder? The historical record suggests she did. But that is not the only question. The real question is whether she received a fair trial – and whether her race and poverty played a role in her death sentence.
The evidence suggests they did. The jury was all-white. The trial lasted two days. Her court-appointed attorneys were overworked and underfunded. The governor who refused to commute her sentence was a law-and-order politician with no incentive to show mercy.
Seventy-five years later, Corrine Sykes lies in an unmarked grave. No headstone bears her name. But her story – and the questions it raises – remain unfinished business.
Until the death penalty is applied fairly, without regard to race, wealth, or chance, justice will remain incomplete. And the ghost of Corrine Sykes will continue to haunt the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Primary Sources:
The Philadelphia Inquirer – “Seventy-five years after the death of Corrine Sykes, why do chance and politics still determine who lives?” (Kathryn Canavan, October 8, 2021)
George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Photograph Collection – Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries
Pennsylvania Prison Society archives
Montgomery County Courthouse records – Commonwealth v. Corrine Sykes (1945)
Pennsylvania Department of Corrections – Rockview State Prison execution records
Death Penalty Information Center – Racial disparities in capital punishment
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – reports on race and the death penalty