Electric chair
A significant shift occurred on February 8, 2008, when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled electric chair execution as "cruel and unusual punishment" under the state constitution.
[2] That evening a drunken dock worker named George Lemuel Smith, looking for the thrill of a tingling sensation he had noticed when grabbing the guard rail in a Brush Electric Company arc lighting power house, managed to sneak his way back into the plant at night and grabbed the brush and ground of a large electric dynamo.
[4] Southwick joined physician George E. Fell and the head of the Buffalo ASPCA in a series of experiments electrocuting hundreds of stray dogs.
[5] Southwick went on in the early 1880s to advocate that this method be used as a more humane replacement for hanging in capital cases, coming to national attention when he published his ideas in scientific journals in 1882 and 1883.
[6] After a series of botched hangings in the United States, there was mounting criticism of that form of capital punishment and the death penalty in general.
[7][8] The commission members surveyed the history of execution and sent out a fact-finding questionnaire to government officials, lawyers, and medical experts all around the state asking for their opinion.
[13][10] In 1888, the Commission recommended electrocution using Southwick's electric chair idea with metal conductors attached to the condemned person's head and feet.
Brown had been on his own crusade against alternating current after the shoddy installation of pole-mounted AC arc lighting lines in New York City had caused several deaths in early 1888.
Brown used alternating current for all of his tests on animals larger than a human, including 4 calves and a lame horse, all dispatched with 750 volts of AC.
[18] Based on these results the Medico-Legal Society recommended the use of 1000–1500 volts of alternating current for executions and newspapers noted the AC used was half the voltage used in the power lines over the streets of American cities.
Westinghouse criticized these tests as a skewed self-serving demonstration designed to be a direct attack on alternating current and accused Brown of being in the employ of Edison.
[19] At the request of death penalty commission chairman Gerry, Medico-Legal Society members; electrotherapy expert Alphonse David Rockwell, Carlos Frederick MacDonald, and Columbia College professor Louis H. Laudy, were given the task of working out the details of electrode placement.
[20] George Fell drew up the final designs for a simple oak chair and went against the Medico-Legal Society recommendations, changing the position of the electrodes to the head and the middle of the back.
[23] The first person in line to die under New York's new electrocution law was Joseph Chapleau, convicted for beating his neighbor to death with a sled stake, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Blood vessels under the skin ruptured and bled, and the areas around the electrodes singed; some witnesses reported that his body caught fire.
[28] The electric chair was adopted by Ohio (1897), Massachusetts (1900), New Jersey (1906), and Virginia (1908), and soon became the prevalent method of execution in the United States, replacing hanging.
Twenty-six states, the District of Columbia, the federal government, and the U.S. military either had death by electrocution on the books or actively executed criminals using the method.
A well-publicized triple execution took place there in May 1972, when Jaime Jose, Basilio Pineda, and Edgardo Aquino were electrocuted for the 1967 abduction and gang-rape of the young actress Maggie de la Riva.
[30] Leon Czolgosz was executed in the electric chair at New York's Auburn Prison on October 29, 1901, for the assassination of then-President William McKinley.
[32] On June 16, 1944, an African-American teenager, 14-year-old George Stinney, became the youngest person ever executed in the electric chair when he was electrocuted at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina.
Various cycles (changes in voltage and duration) of alternating current are passed through the individual's body in order to cause lethal damage to the internal organs.
If none are present, the doctor reports and records the time of death, and prison officials will wait for the body to cool down before removing it to prepare for autopsy.
If the inmate exhibits signs of life, the doctor notifies the warden, who usually will order another round of electric current or (rarely) postpone the execution such as with Willie Francis.
[41] Trying to address such concerns, Nebraska introduced a new electrocution protocol in 2004, which called for the administration of a 15-second application of current at 2,450 volts; after a 15-minute wait, an official then checks for signs of life.
The argument was rejected on the basis that re-execution did not violate the double jeopardy clause of the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution, and Francis was returned to the electric chair and executed in 1947.
As of 2024, the only places that still reserve the electric chair as an option for execution are the U.S. states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee.
The electric chair was used quite frequently in post-Gregg v Georgia executions during the 1980s, but its use in the United States gradually declined in the 1990s due to the widespread adoption of lethal injection.
[53] In 2022, a judge in Richland County, declared that the firing squad and electrocution were both in violation of the South Carolina State Constitution, which bans methods that are "cruel, unusual, or corporal."
The decision also called electrocution "inconsistent with both the concepts of evolving standards of decency and the dignity of man", and stated, "Even if an inmate survived only fifteen or thirty seconds, he would suffer the experience of being burned alive—a punishment that has 'long been recognized as manifestly cruel and unusual.'"
[54] On March 5, 2024, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a law reintroducing electrocution and also allowing executions to be carried out via nitrogen gas.
