Old Sparky
In the Medina incident, prison officials apparently did not properly soak the sponge in saline and it caught fire as well.
Prison officials later determined the blood came from a profuse nosebleed most likely caused by an improperly fitted head strap.
A prison inspector general took photographs of Davis's bloody body, still strapped in the chair, shortly after execution.
These lawsuits ultimately came to the Florida Supreme Court in the fall of 1999, when a majority (4 of the 7 Justices) found that the electric chair was constitutional in a case brought by death row inmate Thomas Provenzano.
One of the dissenting Justices, Leander J. Shaw, Jr., took the extraordinary step of attaching to his opinion three color photographs of Davis's bloody body strapped in the chair.
Some death penalty supporters in the United States viewed the photographs as a deterrent, apparently believing they had been posted on the website as a warning to all potentially dangerous criminals.
Partly on the advice of Attorney General Butterworth, Florida's Governor Jeb Bush summoned the legislature into special session and in early 2000 it quickly approved lethal injection as the means of execution that must be used unless the inmate requests electrocution.
The Attorney General then notified the Federal court and it agreed to dismiss the case based on the change in law.
It was first used on July 8, 1911; the first inmate to die in the chair was James Buckner, convicted of killing a police officer several weeks earlier.
Alfred P. Southwick, a member of the committee, developed the idea of putting electric current through a device after hearing about how relatively painlessly and quickly a drunken man died after touching exposed power lines.
As Southwick was a dentist accustomed to performing procedures on sitting subjects, his electrical device appeared in the form of a chair.
The order of execution, which would start at 4:30 a.m., was listed as James J. Slocum, Harris Smiler, Shibuya Jugiro, and Joseph Wood.
After the condemned prisoner was strapped into the chair and the electrodes attached, the warden would step forward and read out the final decision on the sentence.
[19] Today, It is still managed by the South Carolina Department of Corrections, and is the oldest electric chair still online in the world.
The move provided better management controls and ensured correctional staff who dealt with condemned prisoners on a daily basis were not the same officers given the responsibility of carrying out capital punishment.
[20] The most recent use of "Old Sparky" was on June 21, 2008 when convicted murderer James Earl Reed opted for this method of execution.
[23][24] In 1971, the Greater Dallas Crime Commission, a business organization, circulated a petition to recommission Texas's "Old Sparky".
[26] The chair was bolted to a low platform which covered what had previously been the trapdoor of the gallows used in the state's judicial hangings.
Its control apparatus was designed in such a way that three push-button switches were to be simultaneously pressed by three members of the execution team; only one of these switches actually completed the circuit, allowing each member of the execution team to reassure himself that perhaps he had not been the one who had actually initiated the death of the condemned.
