THE ELECTRICAL DEATH COMMISSION
Two things drove the move to reform capital punishment. One was what the Supreme Court would eventually call “evolving standards” in society. People wanted to get away from the barbarism of the past. The second thing was botched executions. Every time a hanging was done wrong, leaving a prisoner jerking on the end of a rope for twenty agonizing minutes as the life was slowly squeezed out of him or her, it fueled calls for a new and more modern method of carrying out executions.
These botched executions led to regular calls for the abolition of the death penalty, which rarely got anywhere. In 1832 the New York Assembly appointed a committee to consider abolishing capital punishment entirely. This followed a hanging that led to a riot where a number of people were killed. The committee introduced a bill which was heavily defeated. But executions were moved from public spaces into prisons a few years later.
After the horrors of the Civil War, Americans became more sensitive to suffering and less tolerant of brutal executions. Doctors and scientists began to follow the European lead, trying to come up with humane execution methods.
France had replaced the savage breaking on a wheel with the quick and painless guillotine. Spain had perfected the garrote, resulting in a speedy death. Britain had turned hanging into a fine art. But the advances in hanging techniques only made their way to America slowly, and the job was still done badly as frequently as it was done well. Soon some scientists with a social conscience began to look at the problem.
On July 24, 1886, Dr. Wooster Beach published his thoughts in the Medical Record. He recounted his studies on the victims of hanging. Even with the long drop favored by the British, only one in twenty of the victims ended up with a broken neck and an instantaneous death. The rest suffered “exquisite torture till asphyxia produces insensibility.” He suggested changing the method by which the noose was tied to make the punishment less painful.
Others were turning to more modern approaches. Scientific American carried an article in the March 1883 edition entitled “Killing Cattle by Electricity,” which hinted at the power of the new technology. The article argued that electricity could be used to kill worn-out horses and donkeys and even cattle for food. Two years later, that hint of things to come became explicit when the July 1885 edition of the magazine carried a piece entitled “Electricity for Executing Criminals.” It urged that the “hideous violence” of hanging should be replaced by “judicial lightning.” Two years later, the magazine actually described a prototype electric chair.
Many were taking up the call. One of these was a Buffalo dentist, Dr. Alfred Porter Southwick. Southwick was a strong advocate of electrocution from the start. Born in 1826, he had trained as a steamboat engineer before becoming a highly respected dentist with a practice in Buffalo.
Buffalo was one of the first cities in America to be “electrified.” In 1880 a hydroelectric power generator was installed at nearby Niagara Falls, and by 1885, George Westinghouse installed a big generator on the Falls, powering the nearby town. There were so many incandescent bulbs that Buffalo became known as the City of Lights. But with the light came the danger of electrocution. Insulation was less reliable than it is today and many people got painful shocks—some fatal—from the naked wires.
In 1881 Alfred Southwick saw a drunk man stumble near a generator. The man reached out to stop his fall and touched the metal. There was a quick flash of light and the man dropped to the ground. When Southwick got to him, the man was dead. The shock had killed him instantly. Southwick’s initial reaction was one of horror, but he was also struck by something else. The man’s death, reported the Buffalo Evening News on August 9, 1881, had been instant and—according to Southwick—painless. He thought that this would be a far more humane way of killing prisoners than hanging, which often went wrong, leaving the victim to slowly choke to death, their legs twitching in the air for several minutes. This was known as “dancing the Tyburn Jig,” named after the gallows at Tyburn in London, England. As a Quaker and a believer in progress, he believed technology should be used to take the pain out of the death penalty.
For the next decade, Southwick pushed for electrocution to replace hanging. As a dentist he was used to operating on people in chairs, so naturally he thought of using a chair to carry out electrocutions. Thus, the idea of the electric chair was born.
Once Southwick conceived the idea of electrical executions, he was tireless in his efforts to make it a reality. First, he had to prove that the concept worked, and to do this he began electrocuting stray animals around Buffalo. The experiments worked; the animals all died instantly. So Southwick began lobbying politicians to get the matter before the New York Assembly. He was pushing an open door; newly appointed governor David Bennett Hill was facing a fall election, and he knew that the anti-hanging lobby would be important. So he wanted to throw them a carrot.
“The present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the dark ages and it may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means for taking the life of such as are condemned to die in a less barbarous manner,” he said in a speech on January 6, 1885. Within days, State Senator Daniel MacMillan had persuaded the Assembly to appoint a committee to study the matter. The governor got on board and a commission was set up. As a close friend of Senator MacMillan, Southwick was appointed to the commission. The chair was Edridge T. Gerry, grandson of one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. A skilled attorney, he was a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and also worked with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The final member was attorney Matthew Hale, from another family steeped in the heroism of the Revolutionary War period.
The Gerry Commission, which also became known as the New York Electrical Death Commission, began by surveying jurists, judges, and medical experts on methods of execution. In total, 199 agreed to be involved in the survey, which returned mixed results. Eighty respondents wanted to keep hanging, while eighty-seven were in favor of electricity. That left eight opting for poison (which is now the preferred method in the United States), five were for the guillotine, four for the garrote, and the remainder either went for their own obscure solutions or did not express a preference. While it might seem that there was a narrow majority in favor of electrocution, the survey had been skewered. Many were in favor of electricity only if hanging was abolished. So the true picture was that people wanted to retain hanging but would consider electrocution as an alternative.
Some of the responses were illuminating. Most accepted that electricity would provide a swifter and more humane death, and one suggested reserving it for women, while the men would still hang. Another suggested hanging unless there were mitigating circumstances which warranted the mercy of electrocution.
A very mixed result, but it was enough for the commission to work with. But Southwick quickly realized that Gerry was more open-minded than he and less committed to switching to electrocution. So he wrote to the famous inventor Thomas Edison, to ask for his support. Edison’s initial response was not helpful; as a liberal he was opposed to the death penalty. But he eventually conceded that if executions had to occur, then they should be done in the best possible manner. He wrote: “This, I believe, can be accomplished by the use of electricity, and the most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machinery which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of these are known as ‘alternating machines’ manufactured principally in this country by George Westinghouse. The passage of the current from these machines through the human body, even by the slightest contacts, produces instantaneous death.”
This letter, sent in December 1887, seemed to be an endorsement of electrical execution, but in fact was not. It was a move in a commercial war. Thomas Edison had been losing ground to George Westinghouse in a battle on how to deliver electricity to American households. Edison favored direct current while Westinghouse championed alternating current. And Westinghouse was winning the commercial war. Edison hoped to damage the reputation of his rival if he could associate Westinghouse with the vileness of executing prisoners. The battle between the two industrialists was very influential in the eventual development of the electric chair and will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.
The Gerry Commission published its report on January 17, 1888. In the report, they considered a number of alternatives when it came to imposing the death penalty.
The commission listed thirty-four separate methods of execution from various parts of the world and various historic periods. Some were unbelievably vicious, some were insane, but others were sincere attempts to put a prisoner to death humanely. The report reeled the methods off in alphabetical order:
“Beating with clubs, beheading, blowing from a cannon, boiling, breaking on the wheel, burning, burying alive, crucifixion, defenestration, dichotomy, dismemberment, drowning, exposure to wild beasts, flaying alive, flogging, garrote, guillotine, hanging, hara-kiri, impalement, iron maiden, peine forte et dure, poisoning, pounding in mortar, precipitation, pressing to death, rack, running the gauntlet, shooting, stabbing, stoning, strangling, and suffocation.”
Some of the terms need explanation to the modern reader. Defenestration comes from the Latin word fenestra, or window. It means tossing someone out through a window—hardly a practical method of execution. There are several instances of it in European history but always as a spur-of-the-moment method rather than a planned execution. Hara-kiri is a traditional method of suicide in Japan, involving people disemboweling themselves with a short sword—again, not a practical method of execution. Dichotomy means sawing someone in half—great for a magic show, less appealing as the ultimate sanction of the law. Peine forte et dure was a medieval European method which involved crushing the victim under an enormous weight. It was both a torture and a death and was quickly dismissed by the commission. Precipitation, like defenestration, involved throwing a prisoner from a height, but this time without the intervening window. Running the gauntlet involved a prisoner running through a double line of armed men, with each one taking a swing at him.
Several methods could be dismissed without further discussion, but that left half a dozen or more viable methods of execution which had to be properly considered. And to understand why America went for the electric chair, we must look at the alternatives, just as the commission did.
One of the first things the commission noted was that executions were traditionally less brutal in America than in the rest of the world. They also said that the purpose of execution was to kill the prisoner, not torture them in vengeance. So whatever method New York opted for would have to be as humane as possible.
The methods that were effective and/or widely used were beheading (with a guillotine or without), blowing from a cannon, burning, garrote, hanging, poisoning, shooting, and stoning. The commission had to consider a number of factors in relation to each method. The method had to be sure, it had to be practical, and (according to the constitution) could not be cruel or unusual. There was another consideration—there had to be no chance of resuscitation after an execution. Like the commission, I will be look at the methods in alphabetical order.
METHOD ONE: BEHEADING
Few things are more certain to cause death than losing one’s head. Beheading is an instant (thus humane and painless) method of execution, refined by the invention of the guillotine to make it fast, efficient, and modern. The guillotine, the engine of death so overused during the French Revolution, was one of the first attempts to introduce humanity into the execution process.
Beheading has an ancient history. In fact, the term capital punishment comes from the Latin word caput, meaning head. Losing one’s head for serious offenses goes back millennia. In medieval Europe it was often used on noblemen to save them the indignity of hanging or of being drawn and quartered if their offense was treason. In some countries that beheaded as a matter of course, such as the Scandinavian nations, nobles were beheaded with a sword, while commoners got an axe.
The headsman, or executioner, would ensure that his axe was very sharp. The victim knelt down and placed his head on a wooden block. The headsman then stood over the prisoner and raised the axe. If his aim was true and the blade honed, death was instant. But if he was nervous or if the prisoner struggled, it could take multiple blows to sever the head. When Henry VIII ordered the execution of sixty-seven-year-old Margaret Pole for treason, the terrified old lady struggled so much the axe struck her across the shoulders. She jumped up from the block and ran into the crowd of onlookers, screaming, as the executioner chased her, raining blows on her back with his axe. She was eventually brought back to the block, but a total of ten blows were required before her head was severed.
In Saudi Arabia to this day beheadings are carried out with a sword. The sword is heavy, a two-handed weapon with a very sharp blade. The prisoner kneels and the sword is swung from behind. No block is used. Beheadings by axe continued in Europe until 1825 when Tahvo Putkonen was executed for murder in Finland. He had killed a neighbor the day after Christmas because he objected to the neighbor’s table manners. He was also fined for disturbing the holiday peace, a fine that was extracted before his execution.
Beheadings moved into the modern age in France with the invention of the guillotine. There were precursors to this killing machine. The Halifax Gibbet was a wooden structure with two uprights which supported a heavy blade. It was used from 1280 until 1650 in Halifax, England. There were other beheading machines used in England, though rarely, in medieval and early modern times.
French doctor Antoine Louis, together with German engineer Tobias Schmidt, took the old idea and modernized it, replacing the straight blade of earlier models with a slanted blade, which made it far more efficient. He invented his beheading machine shortly before the start of the French Revolution. It followed an appeal in 1789 by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin to the National Assembly to adopt beheading as the universal method of execution and to come up with a machine to make it swift and humane. The new machine was to replace the breaking wheel, the traditional method of capital punishment in France. As previously described, victims of the breaking wheel were strapped to a cart wheel and their limbs broken by repeated hammer blows until they died. As the blows were to the arms and legs, rather than to torso and head, death was prolonged and painful.
The machine was ready within three years and was tested on highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier on April 25, 1792. Death was instantaneous. Over the following few years the machine was well and truly tested, with often hundreds of aristocrats being decapitated before large crowds of Parisians during the gory years of the revolution. It proved to be very efficient at handling the large numbers.
One peculiarity of death by decapitation is that it takes a few seconds for the brain to die. There is some evidence that consciousness could last for up to eight seconds following the fatal blow. That means that when the executioner held the head aloft to the cheering crowd, the victim could see the faces swimming in front of him before the blood loss and oxygen starvation switched off the brain for good. However, there is no evidence that the brain could perceive pain after the spinal column is severed.
The guillotine remained in use in Germany until 1949 and in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981. Of all the methods of execution designed to increase the efficiency and humanity of the death penalty, it is perhaps the best. A prolonged and painful death was an impossibility. It was a simple mechanism that could not be botched. It should have been a natural alternative to the electric chair. But North America had no history of beheading. The territory of Utah had allowed it as an option for those condemned to die but no one had ever chosen it. And when Utah became the forty-fifth state of the Union in 1896, it was removed as an option.
The New York Commission failed to consider the most efficient and humane death machine of all. Their objection was that the “profuse effusion of blood” would be too shocking for witnesses and the guillotine was too much associated with the bloodshed of the French Revolution to be considered.
METHOD TWO: BLOWING FROM A CANNON
Blowing from a cannon sounds horrific but on closer examination it is actually quite a humane method of execution. Typically a prisoner is tied to the mouth of a cannon, which is then shot, tearing the prisoner’s body apart and killing him instantly. It was widely used for nearly three hundred years, mainly in Asia. This description comes from George Carter Stent, a British official with the Chinese Maritime Customs in the 1870s: “The prisoner is generally tied to a gun with the upper part of the small of his back resting against the muzzle. When the gun is fired, his head is seen to go straight up into the air some forty or fifty feet; the arms fly off right and left, high up in the air and fall at, perhaps, a hundred yards distance; the legs drop to the ground beneath the muzzle of the gun; and the body is literally blown away altogether, not a vestige being seen.”
The practice began among the Moguls in the Indian subcontinent in the early sixteenth century. When the British Raj was in control of India they needed a method of execution for natives guilty of mutiny or desertion from the army, and just like the New York Electrical Death Commission, they set up a committee to look at the alternatives. The normal method of execution at the time was flogging the prisoner to death. This was a slow and painful death, dragged out over several minutes. It was traumatic on both the victim and the executioner. The committee chose blowing from a cannon as a more humane alternative.
It also had the advantage of being a huge deterrent. The sight of a prisoner being literally blown apart would inspire fear in other potential mutineers and keep the natives in line.
The cannon was normally loaded with a blank charge—just powder and wadding. But still, things could go wrong. At a mass execution in Firozpur, Punjab, India, in 1857 someone accidentally loaded grapeshot into the cannons instead of the blank charge. Several of the spectators were hit with the grapeshot resulting in one death and two serious injuries. The two who were injured had to have limbs amputated as a result of the botched execution.
Another danger was flying body parts. Soldiers who did not get clear of the cannon in time risked injuries from whizzing pieces of flesh and bone, and there is one instance, again in Firozpur in 1862, of a soldier being concussed by a falling arm.
Most methods of execution fail on occasion, and that is true of blowing from a cannon. This account comes from the Bombay Gazette:
After the explosion, the grouping of the men’s remains in front of each gun was various and frightful. One man’s head was perched upon his back, and he was staring round as if looking for his legs and arms. All you see at the time was a cloud like a dust storm composed of shreds of clothing, burning muscle, and frizzing fat with lumps of coagulated blood. Here and there a stomach or a liver came falling down in a stinking shower. One wretched fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied to the guns just before the explosion, and his arm was nearly set on fire. While hanging in his agony under the gun, a sergeant applied a pistol to his head. This was the most horrible sight of all. I have seen death in all its forms, but never anything to equal this man’s end.
Then there were the birds of prey which circled overhead, swooping down to catch the flying flesh of the condemned—and the dogs that swarmed the field after every execution. Gruesome. Blowing from a cannon never spread beyond Asia, aside from a few instances in Portuguese colonies in Mozambique and Brazil. It was used up until 1930 in Afghanistan.
But it was too cruel for American sensibilities, and was never seriously considered by the commission.
One of the most ancient and widespread methods of carrying out the death penalty is by burning. This was recorded from ancient times right up to the last century, and was used in Europe, Africa, Asia, and America. It even has biblical backing. It certainly fulfills the function of being a deterrent—no one would choose it as a method of dying. Spectators were horrified—and strangely fascinated—by the sight of victims being immolated in large public squares throughout Europe.
The most common method was that victims would be tied to a stake and a large fire built around them. Once the fire was ignited, they would burn. If the fire was large, death normally came by way of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning long before the flames began to consume the body. This meant that while it looked barbaric, it was actually quite a gentle death. Aside, that is, from the panic that it would cause its victims.
But if the fire was small, the victim often died in agony of heatstroke, shock, or simply from their internal organs cooking.
Throughout medieval Europe this was a very common method of execution, often reserved for treason, witchcraft, and sexual and religious crimes. Estimates vary, but up to three hundred thousand women may have been put to the torch for the imaginary crime of witchcraft before the Enlightenment ended the practice. It was generally women that went to the stake but sometimes men suffered that fate. The religious nature of the execution was backed up by biblical references aplenty. It was a common practice in the Middle East in biblical times.
In Genesis 38, there is an account of Judah, the founder of one of the Tribes of Israel, condemning his widowed daughter-in-law to death because she became pregnant outside of marriage. But the sentence was set aside when he realized that he was the one who got her in that interesting condition.
Through Roman times and on into the Christian era, burning continued to be carried out. It became the favored method for certain classes of crime. For instance, in the Byzantine Empire burning replaced an older punishment for those convicted of killing a member of their family. The older method involved stuffing the convict in a sack with a rooster, a viper, a dog, and a monkey, then throwing the sack into the sea. A truly bizarre method that never caught on outside of that small corner of the world.
By the Middle Ages, burning was the execution method of choice for heretics and others who offended against the power of the Church. By the thirteenth century it was laid down in law as the principal execution method throughout the sphere of influence of the Roman church. There are many recorded instances of whole Jewish communities being burned at large public spectacles for the next few hundred years. In one day in the winter of 1349, two thousand Jews were burned on a large scaffold at the cemetery in Strasbourg—blamed for bringing the Black Death plague to Europe.
Equally heinous were the actions of the Inquisition, a religious tribunal which policed matters of faith in Spain and Portugal in particular, but also elsewhere in Europe. Established in 1478 in Spain to preserve Catholic orthodoxy, the Inquisition clamped down on heresy, Judaism, and witchcraft. In the first twelve years, two thousand victims burned. In its three hundred-year history, up to fifty thousand others may have met the same fate. A similar number were burned at the stake as witches throughout this period.
Burning also became the punishment of choice for sexual deviance, including homosexuality. But by the nineteenth century, burning had died out as a punishment. The last two instances of it occurred in Germany, in 1804 and 1813. Johannes Thomas was convicted of arson and sentenced to die on July 13, 1804. But he was placed several feet above the pyre—in a wooden chamber attached to a stake. Sulfuric smoke was piped into the chamber, suffocating him before the flames engulfed him. Twenty thousand people watched the execution. In 1813, lovers and arsonists Johann Horst and Friederike Delitz were sentenced to burn. But both were secretly strangled to death by the executioner as he secured them to the stakes, saving them a painful death.
Burning was a popular, though never legally sanctioned, method of execution in North America for centuries. Native Americans used it as a form of execution against members of rival tribes or against white settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their method was slow and painful; the victim was roasted over a fire in a prolonged torture, unlike the quicker “burning at the stake” of the Europeans.
White settlers also occasionally used burning as an execution method. In Massachusetts there are two known cases. In 1681, a slave was burned for trying to kill her master by burning his house down, and in 1755, another slave was burned for killing his master, at Cambridge. In New York there were several cases, generally of slaves. Following the Slave Revolt of 1712, twenty rebels were burned to death, and one was slowly roasted, to act as a deterrent against further revolts. The roasting took ten agonizing hours. The slave was put on a lattice of rods and a smoldering fire lit beneath him—the fire kept hot enough to ensure that his screams rang out for hours.
Thirty years later, following another revolt, thirteen more slaves were put to the torch.
Following the end of slavery, burning continued to be a popular method of carrying out illegal executions on members of the black community, particularly in the southern states. Those lynchings, which continued to the 1960s, are one of the most shameful aspects of American history.
Variants on burning included pouring molten metal down the convict’s throat, boiling the victim alive, and even frying them in oil. These painful methods never made an appearance in America. Though the United States had a history of burning black citizens, it was never used against whites and was not considered seriously by the commission. Although it could be managed to make death painless, and although it left no possibility of resuscitation and no body to martyr, burning was a horrific spectacle that the new nation did not want to consider.
METHOD FOUR: GARROTE
At its simplest, a garrote is a length of rope, wire, or similar ligature which is wrapped around the victim’s neck and tightened, choking or strangling him or her to death. It is a common tool of the assassin and is also used by soldiers who want a quick and silent kill on clandestine missions. The garrote was also, for centuries, the favored method of execution in Spain and its colonies.
Done correctly, it mimics the effect of a short-drop hanging. The victim dies of strangulation. This has two immediate effects—the carotid artery in the brain is compressed, resulting in loss of consciousness and eventual death; and the windpipe is constricted, cutting off oxygen to the lungs. This causes death within minutes at the most. Unlike short-drop hanging, the pressure is applied from the rear, rather than from a rope above the prisoner’s head. This means that far more pressure is applied directly on the neck, resulting in a faster death. As any wrestler or mixed martial artist will attest, a correctly applied choke hold results in unconsciousness in seconds, making a garrote a very efficient tool for executions.
The method came from the Moors and Arabs and was perfected in Spain several hundred years ago. It is named from “garrote,” a small stick or club. Traditionally a garrote had two short sticks with the ligature between them. The executioner used the sticks for grip and to tighten the pressure. But the initial garrote executions involved prisoners being beaten to death with the short sticks; strangulation only gradually crept in. Eventually garroting became a precise science.
By the eighteenth century, the garrote consisted of a chair with a pole behind it. The prisoner sat in the chair and a chain or rope was wrapped around his neck strapping him to the pole. Then a screw was turned which rapidly tightened the noose, resulting in quick loss of consciousness. A further refinement was a bolt or spike that came out of the pole and pressed into the back of the neck as the screw tightened. This bolt would snap the spinal column, resulting in instant death from a broken neck. This way the garrote was slightly slower than a perfect hanging (though much quicker than a botched one), but absolutely guaranteed to end the life of the prisoner without undue suffering. Of man’s many attempts to find a humane execution method, it is one of the methods that came closest.
As the electric chair is peculiarly American, the garrote was a Spanish specialty, being used in that country and its empire for centuries. It was the method of choice in the Philippines until the United States captured that colony in 1898. The new US authorities maintained the garrote for a few years until it was replaced, briefly, with the electric chair. United States military authorities also used the garrote in Puerto Rico. In a report to Congress, the American military governor Brigadier General George Davis said, “Execution by the garrote is far less inhumane and revolting than execution by hanging.”
Despite this endorsement from a man who had overseen both sorts of execution, the garrote was soon replaced with the gallows. The last public garroting in Spain happened in Barcelona in May 1897. Like most countries in the developed world, executions moved inside to the confines of the prison. The last garroting occurred in March 1974. George Michael Welzel and Salvador Puig Antich were anarchists. During a shoot-out a young police officer was killed and both men were condemned to die. It was an unpopular decision by the Franco-led fascist government and the death penalty was abolished a few years later.
The last country to abandon the garrote was the tiny kingdom of Andorra, in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. They took the method off the books in 1990. But the removal was largely symbolic; there had been no garroting in the principality since the twelfth century.
Despite being considered one of the most humane and practical methods of execution, garroting was never a serious contender to replace hanging in New York. Perhaps it was a bit too hands-on for late-nineteenth century sensibilities. The commission noted its “celerity and certainty,” but argued that the fact that it had not spread beyond Spain showed that it might not be the method to adopt.
METHOD FIVE: HANGING
There is a broad spectrum in executions from the barbaric, such as breaking on a wheel or stoning—to the swift and painless, such as a bullet to the back of the head, the guillotine, or the garrote. Hanging falls more on the humane side but retains an element of the barbaric. It is a gruesome sight to see the convict drop through the trap and dangle in the air, legs twitching. Normally, hanging results in a swift death, but it can go wrong. Too long a drop, and the head snaps off as the body plunges to the ground. Too short, and the convict dies a painful death from strangulation, taking up to ten minutes to die.
Worldwide, hanging is one of the most popular methods of execution. In the English-speaking world, it was almost universal for a while. It has a long history. Initially, hanging was a lot more brutal than it is today. A noose was placed around the convict’s neck and thrown over a beam of some sort—perhaps a gallows or a branch of a tree. The prisoner was hoisted up and slowly strangled by the weight of his own body against the noose.
Because of the way the pressure was applied, death could be prolonged. In a garrote the pressure is applied directly from the back of the neck, whereas in a hanging the pressure is upwards, reducing its efficiency. That is why a garrote results in speedy loss of consciousness, whereas a hanging can leave the prisoner fully aware of all that his body is suffering. Because of this, the prisoner often twitches and kicks his legs for several minutes as he dies. This death dance became known as the Tyburn Jig. Tyburn was a place of public execution in London, England, for centuries. At Tyburn, there was a three-sided gallows which could hang up to twenty people at a time.
In 1866 an Irish doctor, Samuel Haughton, worked out a new way of hanging. If the noose was placed to the side of the head and the prisoner had a four to six foot drop from the gallows, the noose would snap the prisoner’s neck. This would cause immediate paralysis and unconsciousness, making death come swifter and without pain. Within months, this new method was in use throughout the English-speaking world, where it was considered a vast improvement over the previous slow strangulation. In 1872 William Marwood introduced a refinement, calculating the length of the drop according to the height and weight of the prisoner. This refinement became the standard for executions by hanging.
Of course, a swift and painless death was not always the aim of an executioner. Other variants of hanging were created which prolonged the suffering of the victim. One of the worst was when victims were hung by the ribs. A small incision was made with a knife between two ribs and an iron hook was inserted. The prisoner was suspended by the hook. Normally they would survive for three days or more before succumbing to dehydration. It was used occasionally in Eastern Europe and by the Dutch in Suriname.
Another variant was to hang a convict by the feet. This was used in medieval Europe, often against Jews. The prisoner would take a week or more to die. To add to the public spectacle, the person was often hung between two rabid dogs who would bite and harry the condemned man.
Hanging had a long history in America, being the method of execution used by the early colonists. The largest mass execution in US history was the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux Indians in Minnesota in 1862. Hanging remained in use long after the introduction of the electric chair. In 1979, Billy Bailey shot and killed two elderly people in Delaware. On January 25, 1996, after a last meal of well-done steak and baked potato, he stepped through the trap and into history as the last man to be hanged in the United States.
The New York Commission (which introduced the electric chair) was set up to replace hanging as an execution method. It took ninety years to completely succeed. Their main objection to hanging was that it could go badly wrong. It also created a very grisly public spectacle, especially if the condemned was a woman or someone else who would excite public sympathy. This was a real concern. A few decades after the commission had done its work, there was an armed rebellion in Ireland against British rule. That happened in 1916 in the middle of World War I, and the rebels had virtually no public support. The leaders were executed by firing squad. But one of the leaders, James Connolly, had been injured in the fighting and was placed in a wheelchair for his execution. The reports of a badly injured man being executed in a wheelchair was enough to turn the tide of public opinion against the British authorities and cause the uprising to escalate into an all-out war.
A second concern was the possibility of resuscitation. If a person was cut down too early from a gallows, and the neck had not broken, there was a real possibility he would later wake up. This had happened on a number of occasions, both in the United States and abroad.
Poisoning has ended up the execution method of choice throughout most of the United States, having replaced the electric chair many decades ago. Lethal injection and the gas chamber are two modern and high-tech systems of delivering poison, nothing more.
Poisoning has a long and sordid history but was used more often as a secret method of murder or assassination rather than as the ultimate sanction of the law. There are so many poisons; the choice is bewildering. There are poisons that kill in seconds (cyanide), that kill over weeks or months (arsenic), or that kill without leaving a trace (curare). People can choose how much pain they wanted their victim to suffer—an easy end or a hard one. But there is something sneaky about the poisoner, and lawmakers have historically been reluctant to make something so underhand a method of execution.
The exception was the ancient Athenians, who often sentenced a criminal to drink a potion containing hemlock. Hemlock is a relative of the carrot, but deadly poisonous. The death is a hard one, prolonged over several hours. Symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, headache, weakness, and tremors. The most famous victim was Socrates, the philosopher condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. In 399 BC he took a cup of hemlock under the watchful eye of his executioner. His death was described by fellow philosopher, Plato: “He walked about until his legs began to fail and then he lay on his back and the man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed his foot hard and asked him if he could feel. And he said: ‘No,’ and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself … and said: ‘When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end.’”
It was almost peaceful, in Plato’s account. The truth is that Socrates died in agony.
Poison was often administered to save an important person from the ignominy of a public execution. It was occasionally used to secretly execute someone. There are very strong suspicions that the British authorities used arsenic to poison Napoleon Bonaparte during his exile on the island of St. Helena in the mid-Atlantic. His death in 1821 was officially ruled as caused by stomach cancer, but later analysis showed very high levels of arsenic in his hair; prolonged arsenic poisoning mirrors the symptoms of some cancers.
Poisoning was seriously considered by the New York Commission, as the method of injecting anesthetic was just coming onstream. But the medical profession was against the use of the new hypodermic needles in executions. Needles were already scary, and the profession did not want them to be labeled as an instrument of death. And the commission felt that medical expertise would be needed to make the method work. Two poisons were considered—prussic acid and morphine. Prussic acid was considered too dangerous for non-doctors to handle, and morphine, ironically, was considered too gentle a method of execution. It would eliminate the “great dread of death” and take some element of punishment away from execution.
Poisoning eventually did replace the electric chair in most states. The two methods of poisoning in the United States are the gas chamber and lethal injection.
The gas chamber evokes horrible memories of the Nazi regime in Germany where millions of Jews were killed in the concentration camps and death camps. But smaller gas chambers are found in several prisons in the United States, including Alcatraz in San Francisco. Currently three states use a gas chamber. The first prisoner to go to the chamber was Gee Jon, a Chinese Triad member who killed a member of a rival gang. He was sentenced to die in 1924, and Nevada had just introduced a bill allowing gas to be used in executions. He was the guinea pig.
The execution was almost comical. The California Cyanide Company refused to deliver the poisonous gas to Nevada State Prison in Carson City, so a warden was dispatched to collect the deadly cargo. It was contained in a mobile fumigating unit, normally used for getting rid of pests in houses. When it arrived, the officials in charge of the execution tried to pump the gas under the door of Jon’s cell as he slept, but it leaked back into the corridor and they had to rapidly retreat.
A makeshift gas chamber was hurriedly constructed in the butcher shop of the prison. To make sure it worked, one of the prison cats was locked in the chamber. The experiment was a success. The dead cat was removed and Jon was strapped into a chair in the small room. He was in tears and the warden brusquely told him to “Brace up.” Four pounds of hydrocyanic acid were sprayed into the chamber, but it was a very cold day and the electric heater in the chamber failed to work. Instead of forming a gas, the acid condensed into a puddle on the floor. But enough of it got into the atmosphere and as Jon inhaled, the gas entered his lungs, and after about six seconds his head fell forward. Though he was unconscious, he continued to move for another five minutes. After ten minutes, there was panic in the witness room as some of the gas began to leak. Everyone ran while the warden tried to set up a fan to vent the gas from the chamber. But it was three hours before anyone dared enter the chamber to remove the body.
Eleven states eventually sanctioned the use of gas chambers. Currently six offer it as an option, generally alongside lethal injection. Its use dwindled over the years, and since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, only eleven executions have been carried out in this manner. The problem is that it can be slow, taking up to ten minutes. And prisoners can often resist, breathing shallowly or trying to hold their breath. It is a painful experience for the witnesses.
Lethal injection is the method that has superseded the electric chair throughout most of the country. The condemned is injected with a fatal dose of three drugs—a barbiturate, a paralytic, and a potassium solution. The first causes unconsciousness, the second paralyzes the breathing, and the third stops the heart, in that order.
The method was first proposed as early as 1888 by New York doctor Julius Mount Bleyer. He felt it would be cheaper and easier than hanging, but New York was swinging towards electrocution, so the idea gained no traction.
In 1977, Oklahoma’s state medical examiner, Jay Chapman, proposed a new and painless method of execution, stating that: “An intravenous saline drip shall be started in the prisoner’s arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra short-acting barbiturate, in combination with a chemical paralytic.” The state legislature agreed, approving the new method.
Texas was the first state to actually try lethal injection on Charles Brooks Jr., an African-American from a good middle-class background. Brooks and an accomplice had stolen a car from a dealership and had shot the salesman in the head. On December 7, 1982, after he had a last meal of T-bone steak and fries followed by peach cobbler and iced tea, he was strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber at Huntsville Prison, Texas. The needle was fitted, and then he made a last statement. He had converted to Islam in prison and said a brief prayer to Allah. Then the mixture was pushed through his veins and he passed away peacefully.
Lethal injection proved very popular. It was clinical and efficient, and was adopted by thirty-six of the thirty-seven states that allowed the death penalty. Only Nebraska refused to switch, retaining the electric chair as their exclusive method of execution. Other countries also switched, including China (which leads the world in executions), Taiwan, Guatemala, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
But in recent years the lethal cocktail of drugs, which is imported from Europe, has become difficult to get for many prisons as European Union countries are refusing to export those drugs to the US justice system. As a result, the electric chair may be about to make a comeback.
METHOD SEVEN: SHOOTING
Florida, Missouri, Wyoming, and Utah are seriously considering the use of firing squads if the drugs for lethal injections become difficult to get. Worldwide, shooting is the overwhelming favorite as a method of execution, having replaced the universal dominance of hanging. It is clean, efficient, and clinical. Death is instant.
There are two methods commonly used. A single shot to the head or back, or a firing squad. The single executioner administering the coup de grace was common throughout the Eastern Bloc of Europe under Soviet influence. The only European country that still has the death penalty, Belarus, still uses this method.
The condemned prisoners were marched from their cell through a maze of corridors towards the prison yard. When they got there, they were suddenly shot in the back of the head or neck, dying instantly. Similar methods were used throughout Asia. Until lethal injection became popular, shooting was the first choice in China. Typically, a prisoner was shot once in the back of the head by a rifle or else the executioner opened fire with an automatic rifle, strafing the prisoner’s body with a volley of shots from behind. In neighboring Mongolia the method used is a bullet to the back of the neck from a revolver. This is very hands-on and could probably not work in America because it would be difficult to find willing executioners.
Taiwan has attempted to make shooting as humane and clinical as possible. The prisoner is given a strong anesthetic to render them completely senseless. Then a single shot is aimed at the heart. If the prisoner has volunteered to donate his organs, the shot is aimed at the back of the head instead, ripping through the brain stem. Thailand, until recently, also used a single executioner. The prisoner was shot in the back with a burst of fire from a mounted machine gun.
Other countries opted for the firing squad. A prisoner would stand against a wall or be tied to a stake, with a target pinned to his chest. A team of shooters, generally five or more, would face him and on a command they would all fire simultaneously. Death was normally instantaneous. Sometimes a blank round was mixed with the live rounds, so that the members of the firing squad would not know who had fired the fatal shot. This was done to reinforce the sense of diffusion of responsibility among the shooters. If the shooters felt that they were not personally responsible for the death of the prisoner, they were more likely to aim true. Firing squads were very popular for military courts and were used frequently in war situations.
The only problem is that a single executioner will make sure of the placement of his shot, whereas with a firing squad the marksmen are sometimes less precise.
I remember getting a taxi ride in Boston from a Ugandan driver. While stuck in traffic, he told me about a school tour he was taken on when he was aged twelve. The entire school was bussed to the football stadium in Kampala, where the dictator Idi Amin was staging a mass execution. He gleefully told me how a dozen prisoners were tied to stakes and shot, then replaced by another dozen. The bodies would fall on top of those executed a few minutes earlier. After one group of prisoners were shot and fell, one man staggered to his feet to great cheers from the full stadium. But the firing squad reloaded and all of them shot him again. He fell on top of the heap of bodies, then, unbelievably, he rose again. But after the third volley, he stayed down.
The taxi driver was laughing as he recalled the incident and described it as one of the highlights of his childhood.
This gruesome memory highlights one problem of public executions: they desensitize people to violence. This is one reason why all western countries now conduct executions behind prison walls.
The United States has used firing squads often during war but less often for civilian executions. Since 1608, only 142 men have been judicially shot in America or by the British colony that preceded it. One of the most remarkable executions happened in Nevada in May of 1913. Andriza Mircovich, a barely literate Serbian immigrant, was convicted of murder and offered the choice of death by hanging or firing squad. He opted for the bullet—but there was a problem. No one had ever faced a firing squad in Nevada and no one was willing to be part of the squad. So a shooting machine was created. The machine consisted of a rack of three guns which would be fired automatically when a string was cut. Despite the fact that there was no human shooter, the prison authorities loaded a blank charge in one of the guns. There were three strings and no one knew which ones were connected to the shooting machine. Three prison warders were chosen and given scissors; they cut the strings simultaneously.
The machine worked perfectly but was never used again. Nevada went back to hanging before switching to the electric chair, gas chamber, and lethal injection. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, there have been only three executions by firing squad, all in Utah. The last was of Ronnie Lee Gardner, a double murderer. He was shot by a five-man squad on June 18, 2010. But that may change with the decline in support for lethal injection.
The commission’s objections to the firing squad were, first of all, that it needed a number of trained marksmen rather than a single executioner—secondly, that it might make the public blasé about the use of firearms against people.
This is a horrific method of execution, still used in a dozen countries around the Middle East and Asia, from Pakistan to the Persian Gulf. The victim, often a woman, is buried in the ground with her head and torso (or her head only) protruding, and the crowd of onlookers all throw stones at her until she is reduced to a bloody pulp. It is a slow and torturous form of death, one of the few medieval and ancient barbaric methods to survive into modern times.
Stoning has a long history; it is mentioned several times in the Bible. A sentence of stoning could be for crimes such as cursing God, gathering wood on the Sabbath, and adultery. Today it is reserved for adultery and similar offenses against morality and is confined to Muslim countries, being a part of Sharia Law, the religious law based (very loosely, some would say) on the Koran and other traditional sources.
Depending on the local interpretation, stoning is the punishment for adultery or the punishment for married people committing adultery. In Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia married adulterers get stoned, while unmarried adulterers get flogged 100 times. Other countries stone them all. What is truly horrific is that their definition of adultery is very loose. A thirteen-year-old girl gang-raped in Somalia in 2008 was stoned to death for adultery, despite her age and her complete lack of consent. In Pakistan, a woman was stoned for possessing a mobile phone. Often the sentences are imposed by ad hoc tribal courts in areas where Sharia law is accepted.
Many Muslims, including senior scholars and clerics, are unhappy with stoning as a punishment, claiming that it is not a legitimate part of Sharia law, as it was never mentioned in the Koran. But it has widespread public support. A survey by PEW Research in 2010 found that the majority of people in four out of seven Muslim countries surveyed supported stoning as a punishment for adultery. Turkey and Lebanon were sharply opposed to the punishment, but countries like Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan overwhelmingly supported it. The survey did not include Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States, where support would likely be very high.
Beyond listing it as a method, the Gerry Commission did not consider stoning as appropriate for America.
A NEW METHOD: ELECTROCUTION
Having considered all the methods then in use, the commission turned to a possible new method, namely electricity. They argued that it was the duty of the justice system to impose death as quickly, painlessly, and efficiently as possible. As electricity travels so much faster than a nerve impulse, they maintained that death would occur before a pain signal could return to the brain and be registered there, making electrocution a truly painless method. If the current was kept on for a minute, the nervous system overload and heart failure caused by the electricity would be irreversible, making resuscitation impossible.
Their opinions were backed up by experts, including Professor Elihu Thomson. Professor Thomson, originally from Britain, was an inventor and academic with unparalleled experience in the new science of electricity. He was a founder of the Thomson-Houston Electric Light Company, which would eventually merge with Edison’s company to form General Electric. The professor wrote to the commission saying that alternating current would provide the swiftest death and that an apparatus could be constructed cheaply. He suggested applying the current from the base of the spine to the top of the head. The commission report also included the letter from Edison, backing alternating current as the executioner’s current.
But in addition to expert testimony, they had practical experiments to back up their findings. A Buffalo native, Dr. George E. Fell, had been experimenting with the lethal current and the commission had watched some of his experiments. Fell was a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and when the Buffalo society decided to rid the streets of the city of stray animals, he stepped forward to volunteer for the job. A friend of Southwick’s, he was equally convinced that electrocution would prove a painless death. So he devised a method of electrocuting the stray animals.
The commission watched a demonstration in the police station of the city. He did not use a chair for his grisly work. Instead, he had a pine box lined with zinc, a good conductor. The box was half-filled with salty water, another good conductor. Each animal to be euthanized had a muzzle placed over its snout and a bare copper bit in its mouth. The animal then stood in the brine, and the switch was thrown on. The result, in trial after trial, was instant death. Dr. Fell told the commission that even a full-grown man would be killed instantly by the amount of power in an ordinary electric light circuit. This, as it turned out, was far from true. But the principal was proved. Electrocution did kill.
After studying all the facts, the commission suggested a special chair be constructed, with a headrest and a footrest for the electrodes. It would cost just fifty dollars to construct and would not be expensive to hook up to the local power supply. Alternatively, the prisons could purchase generators to allow far greater current to be used. The commission suggested three generators be purchased, one for each prison that would be carrying out executions. The chairs would run on the generators, but could use local power as a backup if the generators failed.
One of the controversial recommendations of the commission was that executions should be held in secret, with no press observers. The commission said that this was not to limit the freedom of the press, but rather to prevent the press feeding the “vicious and morbid appetite” of the public.
Early in 1888, Charles T. Saxton, the chair of the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, brought a bill before the assembly based on the findings of the Gerry Commission. Opposition was surprisingly strong, much of it coming from Catholic politicians. Their objection was not so much to the execution, but to a recommendation from the commission that the bodies of the executed should be buried anonymously in the prison rather than being returned to relatives for Christian burial. In the end, there was a compromise; relatives could ask for Christian burial in a spot of consecrated ground within the prison. After this, the opposition evaporated and the bill passed comfortably. Just eight opposed it when it came to a vote, with eighty-seven in favor. The bill got a rough ride in the Senate, but passed. On June 4, 1888, Governor Hill signed the Electrical Execution Bill into law. It would come into effect at the start of the following year.
The electric chair was now a reality. Everyone waited in anticipation of its first victim. But the details still had to be worked out. The chief detail was how the power would be delivered to the chair. Would the prison service use Edison’s direct current, or the newer alternating current? It was a question that would embroil the nascent electric chair in a commercial war that had nothing to do with the administration of justice.