SOUTH KINGSTOWN — It is a 19th-century Rhode Island legal case that has lived through the ages in the legal and historical psyche of Rhode Island: the 1844 murder trial that resulted in the hanging of John Gordon, the last time the death penalty was used in the state.

The trial came at a time in the state of anti-immigrant hysteria against Irish Roman Catholics, the first group to immigrate here in large numbers and threaten the hegemony of the Yankee Protestants that ran Rhode Island as their duchy.

Now, Christine King, a University of Rhode Island employee, and Scott Molloy, a URI professor and noted student of Rhode Island history, have identified original papers belonging to Job Durfee, the state Supreme Court chief justice who presided over the Gordon case.

King has carted the papers from one attic to another in a series of moves over her adult life. The documents came from her family home in Tiverton, which was once owned by Durfee. King’s grandfather, a dairy farmer named George Morgan, was proud, said King, “that he got the home of such a respected man, a judge, a rich man.”

In 1975, when her grandfather died, King took the Durfee papers, but didn’t think much of them for years. Finally she took a closer look at them and consulted Molloy, who realized immediately that the Durfee material would have historical significance, because the justice was involved in three of Rhode Island’s most contentious 19th-century trials. Besides the Gordon trial, Durfee was a judge in an 1833 murder trial that ended with the conviction of a Methodist minister in the killing of a female factory worker; the 1842 treason trial of Thomas Wilson Dorr, who led a statewide rebellion against the Yankee establishment that refused to enact universal suffrage or allow immigrants to vote; and the Gordon case and two related trials against Gordon’s brothers for involvement in the murder of Amasa Sprague, who owned a textile factory.

The notes of John Gordon’s trial are in Durfee’s cryptic and difficult-to-read handwriting. After a cursory examination, Molloy says, there “is no smoking gun there” that would provide more clues about Gordon’s guilt or innocence.

“But this is an unbelievable find,” says Molloy. “To be able to see the handwriting of a judge who was involved in some of the most important cases of the 19th century is unusual. It is especially unbelievable to have this kind of original source material surface after so long.”

The John Gordon trial especially resonates to this day. The questions surrounding his death by hanging have long been cited by opponents of capital punishment as evidence that it should not be used in the state’s criminal law. Every time there was a serious attempt at the State House to bring the death penalty back to the state — the last was in the 1990s by then-Rep. Antonio Pires, D-Pawtucket — Gordon’s trial is invoked and measures to reinstitute capital punishment are defeated.

On New Year’s Eve in 1843, Amasa Sprague, a Yankee factory owner, who at the time manufactured textiles in Cranston, was beaten to death. Sprague’s body was discovered in the snow; he had been bludgeoned so brutally that his face was barely recognizable, according to a 1993 book on the subject, Brotherly Love, by Charles and Tess Hoffmann, professors at URI and Rhode Island College, respectively.

Six months before his death, Sprague, scion of one of Rhode Island’s most prominent families — his brother William Sprague was a U.S. senator — used his influence to convince the Cranston City Council to suspend the liquor license of Nicholas Gordon, an Irish immigrant and brother of John Gordon. Nicholas Gordon ran a small store and pub near Sprague’s Cranston factory where workers drank during lunch breaks.

Blame for the alleged revenge killing was quickly put on Nicholas Gordon and his brothers, John and William, Irish immigrants all. A jury found William not guilty but pronounced John guilty after testimony based on contradictory circumstantial evidence. After John’s death, Nicholas went free after a hung jury refused to convict him.

“The justices assumed a dual role throughout all three Gordon trials; they acted as both presiding trial judges and as a supreme court of final appeal, having the power to decide points of law without further appeal except to themselves,” the Hoffmanns write.

Durfee gave instructions to the jury on how to interpret testimony and conversations during deliberations. In one of the most egregious lapses in judicial fairness, Molloy said, Durfee “told the jurors to give greater weight to Yankee witnesses than Irish witnesses.”

“The proceedings were riddled with prejudice against newly arrived Irish Catholics,” said Molloy. “Durfee upheld almost all of the objections raised by the prosecution while overruling most defense challenges.”

One Gordon prosecutor raised the specter of Gaelic solidarity to explain the murder, saying “the tie of kindred to an Irishman is an almost indissoluble bond.”

The Gordon trials were held in an atmosphere of bias against immigrants and Catholics. The Dorr rebellion had sent a shiver through the Yankee elite, who held Rhode Island in a tight grip by control of the ballot box, refusing consistently to allow immigrants and the poor to vote. By the 1850s, the Know-Nothing Party, an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant political party, would control state government.

John Gordon walked to the gallows from his cell at the state prison, which in those days was located in Providence, where the Providence Place mall now stands. Sixty community notables attended the hanging, along with another 1,000 or so people — Molloy says they were most likely Irish immigrants — who stood on the outskirts of the prison but were too far way to see the gallows, which were in the jail courtyard.

The Rev. John Brady, a Catholic priest, shocked the elite observers by saying to Gordon before the hanging: “Have courage, John. You are going to appear before a just and merciful judge. You are going to join myriads of your countrymen, who, like you, were sacrificed to the shrine of bigotry and prejudice.”

Seven years after Gordon’s death, Rhode Island abolished the death penalty. It has never been resurrected, and today the state is 1 of only 12 in the United States without capital punishment.

The Durfee documents will be given to the Rhode Island Historical Society.

“This is a great addition to documents from a contentious time in Rhode Island history,” says Molloy.

smackay@projo.com