While the death penalty is still lawful in 27 states, only Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas actually execute their death row inmates. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that the death penalty itself amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment.
Since the mid-1980s the states that carry out the death penalty have used lethal injection as the principal method of execution. Considered a more humane way to kill condemned prisoners than its predecessors the electric chair and the gas chamber, the use of drugs instead of electricity and lethal gas is more a matter of appearance--aesthetics if you will--than concern for the condemned.
From 1976 through 2023, 1,392 state and federal inmates were executed by lethal injection. Four states--Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia--still allow death row prisoners to choose between deadly drugs and the electric chair.
The Electric Chair
On August 6, 1890 William Kemmler, a convicted murderer serving time at New York's Auburn Prison, earned the distinction of becoming the first person in America to die in the electric chair. The state of Ohio followed New York by replacing hanging with electrocution in 1897. Massachusetts adopted the chair in 1900, New Jersey in 1906 and Virginia in 1908. By the 1930s most of the death penalty states used the electric chair as the primary method of execution. The other states killed their death row inmates by gas, by firing squad or by rope. The state of Kansas continued to hang its prisoners into the early 1960s.
The state of Nebraska was one of the last jurisdictions to employ the electric chair as its sole method of killing murderers. In February 2008 the practice ended when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that electrocution was in itself cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the state's constitution.
The Electric Chair's Golden Era
In the 1920s and 30s, Robert G. Elliott, an electrician from Long Island, the official executioner for six eastern states, electrocuted 387 inmates. For his work he charged $150 an execution. When he threw the switch (or turned the wheel) on two or more inmates at one prison visit he discounted his fee. Some of Elliott's most infamous clients included Bruno Richard Hauptmann (1936) the killer of the Lindbergh baby; Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray (1928) the killers of Ruth's husband Albert; and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927) the Italian anarchists convicted of killing a Boston area bank guard. Mr. Elliott, somewhat of a celebrity and obviously proud of his singular contribution to the American system of criminal justice, wrote a memoir called Agent of Death. The book came out in 1940. Long out of print it is today in the libraries of true crime book collectors.
Electrocuting Fat People
In 1981 Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis murdered a pregnant woman and her two children during a home invasion robbery in Jacksonville, Florida. A year later a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to death. In 1998, as Davis' execution date approached, the 54-year-old's death house attorney argued that the 355-pound inmate was too heavy for the state's 76-year-old electric chair. Since its construction in 1923 the Florida state electric chair had dispatched 200 prisoners. In recent years the chair had been involved in some unsightly executions. For example, death house witnesses in 1997 saw flames shoot from a condemned man's head. So, in 1998, following this unpleasant tableau, the prison, with "Tiny" Davis in mind, oversaw the construction of a new, heavy-duty electric chair. The new device could easily handle a 355-pound guest. On July 8, 1999 the executioner sent 2,300 volts through the metal cap on the fat man's head for two minutes. It wasn't pretty, there was some blood and a little groaning, but the new chair did its job.
The Gas Chamber
Death in a gas chamber usually took six to eighteen minutes. The execution ritual began with the condemned inmate being led into the death chamber and strapped into a chair by his arms, waist, ankles and chest. A mask was placed over the prisoner's face and the chamber sealed. The executioner poured sulfuric acid down a tube into a metal container on the floor, a canister that contained cyanide pellets. The mixture of the chemicals produced a cloud of lethal gas.
An open curtain allowed witnesses to observe the inmate inside the chamber. At the designated moment, the executioner hit an electric switch that combined the chemicals that produced the killing agent.
The gas chamber was an expensive form of execution. Moreover, one could argue that because the condemned man contributed to his own death by breathing in the gas, it was the most cruel. Dr. Allen McLean Hamilton, a toxicologist, first proposed the gassing of death row inmates to the state of Nevada in 1921. That year state legislators abolished the electric chair in favor of the gas chamber. On February 8, 1924 a Chinese immigrant named Gee Jon became the first person in America to be executed by gas. He died in the chamber inside the Nevada State Penitentiary in Carson City.
Eventually adopted by eleven states as the official method of execution, lethal gas killed 594 prisoners in the U.S. from 1924 to 1999.
The Caryl Chessman Case
Caryl Chessman was an armed robber and serial rapist who spent most of his adult life behind bars. In 1948 a Los Angeles jury found him guilty of 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping and rape. Among his crimes he had kidnapped a 17-year-old girl named Mary Alice Meza out of her car and forced her to give him oral sex. He committed a similar offense against another victim, Regina Johnson. Under California law at the time a kidnapping that involved bodily injury was a capital offense. Under this law the judge sentenced Chessman to die in the gas chamber.
Following his highly publicized trial Mr. Chessman continued to argue his innocence through essays and books. His two memoirs, written behind bars, became bestsellers. During his twelve years on San Quentin's death row he filed dozens of appeals and managed to avoid eight execution dates. Following his failed last-minute attempt to avoid death with a writ of habeas corpus filed with the California Supreme Court, Caryl Chessman died of asphyxiation on May 2, 1960 in San Quentin's gas chamber. He is the only person to die in the gas chamber for a crime other than murder.
Lethal Injection
By the 21st century state executioners were injecting death row inmates with a three-drug cocktail that included pentobarbital. When the European manufacturers of this deadly drug stopped exporting it and other killing agents to the United States, executioners found themselves in a fix. Some began using a single drug--usually pentobarbital if they had it--while others concocted new experimental cocktails made of drugs available in the United States.
Anti-capital punishment activists used the lethal drug supply problem to further their push to have the death penalty abolished altogether. But for these crusaders, if it wasn't the inhumanity of using untested drugs, it was something else. Death house attorneys and political activists objected to executing prisoners who, when they committed their murders were under eighteen; were fat with hard-to-find veins; who had low I.Q.s; and in the case of a Missouri murderer named Russell Bucklew, wasn't healthy enough to be humanely executed.
The Clayton Lockett Case
In 1999 an Oklahoma criminal named Clayton Lockett tortured then buried alive an 18-year-old girl who had been unfortunate enough to cross this predator's path. On April 29, 2014 the executioner at the state penitentiary in McAlester administered a three-drug cocktail of Midazalam (to render him unconscious), Vecuronium (to stop his breathing) and potassium chloride (to stop his heart).
Seven minutes after the drugs went into Lockett's body he was still conscious. He moved his head and tried to get off the gurney seventeen minutes into the execution. Finally, 43 minutes after being injected, the 38-year-old died of a heart attack. It wasn't a perfect well-oiled killing, but in the end the drugs worked.
By describing Lockett's death as torture, a horrible ordeal and a nightmare, death house lawyers, anti-capital punishment crusaders and people in the media who supported their cause, exploited Lockett's "botched" execution for all its worth. Suddenly executing a sadistic rapist and cold-blooded murderer by lethal injection became cruel and unusual punishment. For those who were not losing sleep over Clayton Lockett's bumpy ride into eternity, listening to this hand-wringing amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
Back to Bullets
In 2014 politicians in Utah, Wyoming and Missouri proposed bringing back the firing squad. In Utah legislators abolished death by firing squad in 2004, citing the excessive media attention surrounding this form of execution. Still, murderers sentenced before 2004 had the option to die by shooting. In 2010 Ronnie Lee Gardner, a man who fatally shot a Salt Lake City attorney in 1985 in Gardner's attempt to flee the court house, selected the firing squad over lethal injection. Five police officers used .30-caliber Winchester rifles to carry out Gardner's execution. Unlike Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, Mr. Gardner died instantly. Nevertheless, those who opposed capital punishment fretted that the executioners might miss their target causing a slow and painful death. There was, however, a simple solution to this problem: give each executioner two bullets.
The Return of the Electric Chair
On May 22, 2014 Tennessee Governor Bill Hallam signed a bill allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event the state was unable to acquire the proper drugs for the execution. Lawmakers had overwhelmingly passed the bill the previous month with most people in the state supporting the new law. According to a 2014 Vanderbilt University poll 56 percent of registered voters in the state welcomed the return of the chair.
Corrections officials in Tennessee were also dealing with the lethal drug shortage. Electricity, on the other hand, didn't come from Europe and was in good supply.
In Tennessee, Daryl Holton, in 2009, was the last man in the state to die in the electric chair. In 1997 the Gulf War veteran murdered his three sons and a stepdaughter with a high-powered rifle in their Shelbyville, Tennessee garage. Death by electrocution was his choice of execution.
Since the mid-1980s the states that carry out the death penalty have used lethal injection as the principal method of execution. Considered a more humane way to kill condemned prisoners than its predecessors the electric chair and the gas chamber, the use of drugs instead of electricity and lethal gas is more a matter of appearance--aesthetics if you will--than concern for the condemned.
From 1976 through 2023, 1,392 state and federal inmates were executed by lethal injection. Four states--Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia--still allow death row prisoners to choose between deadly drugs and the electric chair.
The Electric Chair
On August 6, 1890 William Kemmler, a convicted murderer serving time at New York's Auburn Prison, earned the distinction of becoming the first person in America to die in the electric chair. The state of Ohio followed New York by replacing hanging with electrocution in 1897. Massachusetts adopted the chair in 1900, New Jersey in 1906 and Virginia in 1908. By the 1930s most of the death penalty states used the electric chair as the primary method of execution. The other states killed their death row inmates by gas, by firing squad or by rope. The state of Kansas continued to hang its prisoners into the early 1960s.
The state of Nebraska was one of the last jurisdictions to employ the electric chair as its sole method of killing murderers. In February 2008 the practice ended when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that electrocution was in itself cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the state's constitution.
The Electric Chair's Golden Era
In the 1920s and 30s, Robert G. Elliott, an electrician from Long Island, the official executioner for six eastern states, electrocuted 387 inmates. For his work he charged $150 an execution. When he threw the switch (or turned the wheel) on two or more inmates at one prison visit he discounted his fee. Some of Elliott's most infamous clients included Bruno Richard Hauptmann (1936) the killer of the Lindbergh baby; Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray (1928) the killers of Ruth's husband Albert; and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927) the Italian anarchists convicted of killing a Boston area bank guard. Mr. Elliott, somewhat of a celebrity and obviously proud of his singular contribution to the American system of criminal justice, wrote a memoir called Agent of Death. The book came out in 1940. Long out of print it is today in the libraries of true crime book collectors.
Electrocuting Fat People
In 1981 Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis murdered a pregnant woman and her two children during a home invasion robbery in Jacksonville, Florida. A year later a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to death. In 1998, as Davis' execution date approached, the 54-year-old's death house attorney argued that the 355-pound inmate was too heavy for the state's 76-year-old electric chair. Since its construction in 1923 the Florida state electric chair had dispatched 200 prisoners. In recent years the chair had been involved in some unsightly executions. For example, death house witnesses in 1997 saw flames shoot from a condemned man's head. So, in 1998, following this unpleasant tableau, the prison, with "Tiny" Davis in mind, oversaw the construction of a new, heavy-duty electric chair. The new device could easily handle a 355-pound guest. On July 8, 1999 the executioner sent 2,300 volts through the metal cap on the fat man's head for two minutes. It wasn't pretty, there was some blood and a little groaning, but the new chair did its job.
The Gas Chamber
Death in a gas chamber usually took six to eighteen minutes. The execution ritual began with the condemned inmate being led into the death chamber and strapped into a chair by his arms, waist, ankles and chest. A mask was placed over the prisoner's face and the chamber sealed. The executioner poured sulfuric acid down a tube into a metal container on the floor, a canister that contained cyanide pellets. The mixture of the chemicals produced a cloud of lethal gas.
An open curtain allowed witnesses to observe the inmate inside the chamber. At the designated moment, the executioner hit an electric switch that combined the chemicals that produced the killing agent.
The gas chamber was an expensive form of execution. Moreover, one could argue that because the condemned man contributed to his own death by breathing in the gas, it was the most cruel. Dr. Allen McLean Hamilton, a toxicologist, first proposed the gassing of death row inmates to the state of Nevada in 1921. That year state legislators abolished the electric chair in favor of the gas chamber. On February 8, 1924 a Chinese immigrant named Gee Jon became the first person in America to be executed by gas. He died in the chamber inside the Nevada State Penitentiary in Carson City.
Eventually adopted by eleven states as the official method of execution, lethal gas killed 594 prisoners in the U.S. from 1924 to 1999.
The Caryl Chessman Case
Caryl Chessman was an armed robber and serial rapist who spent most of his adult life behind bars. In 1948 a Los Angeles jury found him guilty of 17 counts of robbery, kidnapping and rape. Among his crimes he had kidnapped a 17-year-old girl named Mary Alice Meza out of her car and forced her to give him oral sex. He committed a similar offense against another victim, Regina Johnson. Under California law at the time a kidnapping that involved bodily injury was a capital offense. Under this law the judge sentenced Chessman to die in the gas chamber.
Following his highly publicized trial Mr. Chessman continued to argue his innocence through essays and books. His two memoirs, written behind bars, became bestsellers. During his twelve years on San Quentin's death row he filed dozens of appeals and managed to avoid eight execution dates. Following his failed last-minute attempt to avoid death with a writ of habeas corpus filed with the California Supreme Court, Caryl Chessman died of asphyxiation on May 2, 1960 in San Quentin's gas chamber. He is the only person to die in the gas chamber for a crime other than murder.
Lethal Injection
By the 21st century state executioners were injecting death row inmates with a three-drug cocktail that included pentobarbital. When the European manufacturers of this deadly drug stopped exporting it and other killing agents to the United States, executioners found themselves in a fix. Some began using a single drug--usually pentobarbital if they had it--while others concocted new experimental cocktails made of drugs available in the United States.
Anti-capital punishment activists used the lethal drug supply problem to further their push to have the death penalty abolished altogether. But for these crusaders, if it wasn't the inhumanity of using untested drugs, it was something else. Death house attorneys and political activists objected to executing prisoners who, when they committed their murders were under eighteen; were fat with hard-to-find veins; who had low I.Q.s; and in the case of a Missouri murderer named Russell Bucklew, wasn't healthy enough to be humanely executed.
The Clayton Lockett Case
In 1999 an Oklahoma criminal named Clayton Lockett tortured then buried alive an 18-year-old girl who had been unfortunate enough to cross this predator's path. On April 29, 2014 the executioner at the state penitentiary in McAlester administered a three-drug cocktail of Midazalam (to render him unconscious), Vecuronium (to stop his breathing) and potassium chloride (to stop his heart).
Seven minutes after the drugs went into Lockett's body he was still conscious. He moved his head and tried to get off the gurney seventeen minutes into the execution. Finally, 43 minutes after being injected, the 38-year-old died of a heart attack. It wasn't a perfect well-oiled killing, but in the end the drugs worked.
By describing Lockett's death as torture, a horrible ordeal and a nightmare, death house lawyers, anti-capital punishment crusaders and people in the media who supported their cause, exploited Lockett's "botched" execution for all its worth. Suddenly executing a sadistic rapist and cold-blooded murderer by lethal injection became cruel and unusual punishment. For those who were not losing sleep over Clayton Lockett's bumpy ride into eternity, listening to this hand-wringing amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
Back to Bullets
In 2014 politicians in Utah, Wyoming and Missouri proposed bringing back the firing squad. In Utah legislators abolished death by firing squad in 2004, citing the excessive media attention surrounding this form of execution. Still, murderers sentenced before 2004 had the option to die by shooting. In 2010 Ronnie Lee Gardner, a man who fatally shot a Salt Lake City attorney in 1985 in Gardner's attempt to flee the court house, selected the firing squad over lethal injection. Five police officers used .30-caliber Winchester rifles to carry out Gardner's execution. Unlike Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, Mr. Gardner died instantly. Nevertheless, those who opposed capital punishment fretted that the executioners might miss their target causing a slow and painful death. There was, however, a simple solution to this problem: give each executioner two bullets.
The Return of the Electric Chair
On May 22, 2014 Tennessee Governor Bill Hallam signed a bill allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event the state was unable to acquire the proper drugs for the execution. Lawmakers had overwhelmingly passed the bill the previous month with most people in the state supporting the new law. According to a 2014 Vanderbilt University poll 56 percent of registered voters in the state welcomed the return of the chair.
Corrections officials in Tennessee were also dealing with the lethal drug shortage. Electricity, on the other hand, didn't come from Europe and was in good supply.
In Tennessee, Daryl Holton, in 2009, was the last man in the state to die in the electric chair. In 1997 the Gulf War veteran murdered his three sons and a stepdaughter with a high-powered rifle in their Shelbyville, Tennessee garage. Death by electrocution was his choice of execution.
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