"Old Sparky," as the state's electric chair is wryly called, may have spit its last spark.

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download ""Old Sparky," as the state's electric chair is wryly called, may have spit its last spark."

Sara Joseph
6 years ago
Views:

1 THE PALM BEACH POST BOTCHED EFFORTS SCAR CAPITAL PUNISHMENT LEGISLATURE TO CONSIDER LETHAL INJECTION Date: Monday, January 3, 2000 By Michael Browning Palm Beach Post Staff Writer "Old Sparky," as the state's electric chair is wryly called, may have spit its last spark. Embarrassed by executions accompanied by flames, smoke and sudden effusions of blood, Florida's Legislature will meet in special session this week to ponder retiring the hot seat in favor of lethal injection. Legislators hope putting people to death on a white-sheeted gurney will prove a tidier way to launch the condemned into eternity. But death penalty opponents say there is no foolproof way to forcibly take a man's life, and that lethal injection offers as many opportunities for messy bungling as electrocution, a method now used by only four states - Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Nebraska. Indeed, the entire history of capital punishment has been marked by spectacularly messy endings. Botched executions forced Florida to switch from the gallows to the electric chair in Hangings were left up to local counties to perform, and because there was no state money allocated for a traveling professional hangman, the executioner's competence varied wildly from county to county. Over and over again, the drop failed to break the neck as it was supposed to, leaving the condemned man to dangle and struggle until he finally suffocated. The electric chair, which premiered in New York in 1890, was supposed to be lightning-quick, the last word in efficiency. It hasn't turned out that way. Over and over again, multiple jolts have failed to still the heartbeat, resulting in macabre scenes and desperate expedients. In one Louisiana execution, the intended victim screamed, lunged backward, knocked the chair over and begged for the headpiece to be removed so that he could breathe. In another execution in Arkansas in the 1930s, a man presumed dead revived and began groaning on the autopsy table - he was strapped back into the chair semiconscious and electrocuted again. In a 1995 article, the University of Florida's Michael Radelet listed 13 botched electrocutions since the death penalty was reinstated in Three have occurred in Florida. On May 4, 1990, Jesse Tafero's head caught fire during his electrocution because a cellulose sponge instead of a sea sponge soaked in salt water was placed on his bare scalp to enhance the electrical contact. As horrified witnesses and reporters watched, smoke filled the death chamber. Gouts of flame a foot high erupted from the head of Pedro Medina when he was executed March 24, This time a corroded wire was blamed for the blaze. By then the oaken chair was 75 years old and beginning to show its age. There were cracks in

2 it, and one arm was loose. It was a homemade thing, fashioned by inmates themselves. So a new chair was built, this time by guards. It was no more foolproof than the old one: On July 8, 1999, blood spurted from the nose and mouth of Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis during his execution and ghastly pictures of his corpse, still seated and strapped into the chair, have found their way onto the Internet, where they can be seen at a site appropriately named awful.rotten.com/chair/davis.html. HEMP SOLUTION Before the chair, came the gallows. Men were hanged in Florida even in territorial days, and in 1848 a female slave named Celia was hanged for the murder of her master, Jacob Bryan, in Duval County. Early records are sparse, and many were lost in the Civil War. From 1869 to 1924, there were 223 legal hangings in Florida, nearly all of them (203) for murder and the remaining 19 for rape. A classic article on hanging, published in 1913 in the British medical journal The Lancet describes how, under ideal circumstances, the noose instantly dislocates the neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae. The "odontoid process" of the second vertebra fractures, severing the spinal cord and closing off the airway to the lungs. However, even if all goes according to plan, the brain remains conscious, and presumably sensible to pain, for several minutes after the drop, until oxygen is exhausted. Breathing and heartbeat may continue spasmodically for 10 to 15 minutes afterward. If the neck doesn't break, the process can be considerably prolonged. In three articles published in 1987 in Sheriff's Star, a law enforcement magazine, Dr. Wali R. Kharif lists a number of botched hangings between 1869 and 1924: "Edward Heinson of Duval County died of strangulation 15 minutes after having received a partially dislocated neck from the drop. A 6-foot fall did not break Alexander Sim's neck in a Jacksonville execution, and he died of suffocation after 20 minutes. It took 17 minutes for Merrick Jackson, of Nassau County, to strangle to death even after an 8-foot fall failed to break his neck." One of the most famous botched executions of the 19th century involved a Florida man, Lewis Powell, also known as Lewis Paine, from Live Oak in north central Florida. Paine was one of four conspirators hanged in Washington after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His mission had been to murder Secretary of State William Seward, and he stabbed the old man repeatedly with a Bowie knife, opening a grievous wound in his cheek, then rushing from Seward's house on Lafayette Square shouting, "I'm mad! I'm mad!" Paine was brought to the gallows on July 7, 1865, along with Mary Surratt, David Herold and George Atzerodt. All fell together. Three died relatively quickly. But Paine, 6-feet-1 and powerfully built, had a bull neck that didn't break when the trap was sprung, and he dangled twitching, fighting for life, for upward of five minutes. Onlookers noticed that his wrists slowly turned purple.

3 When his family claimed his body several years later, it was found to be headless. Paine's skull turned up in the anatomical collection of the Smithsonian Institution in 1992 and was buried with the rest of him in a quiet, shady cemetery in Geneva, Fla., where he lies today. THE SECRET SPECTACLE The transformation of capital punishment in Florida from an outdoor sport to an indoor byinvitation-only function happened within the last century. We have gone from gawkers to peepers in the space of 75 years. Kharif cites public hangings that drew crowds of thousands. "More than 4,000 people saw the execution of Jeff Lowe in a rare Pensacola hanging. The execution of Kelly Stewart in Live Oak, publicized as the first Suwannee County hanging in 12 years, was witnessed by a crowd of 2,000. Napoleon White's hanging in Tallahassee drew 1,500. The double execution of James Kirby and Robert Lee in St. Augustine drew hundreds of spectators in the prison yard, and more than a thousand more outside, perched on wagons, fences and trees, craning their necks to see." But things didn't always go according to plan. One black man, condemned for rape, was asked whether he had any last words. He did: He spoke for 45 minutes, earnestly lecturing the crowd to leave white women alone. Another man, Enoch Doyle, hanged in Alachua County, delivered an impromptu stand-up comedy routine from the gallows, "grinned foolishly and rather liked the notoriety," a newspaper reported. Relatives of victims occasionally screamed, cursed and begged to be allowed to spring the trap. Some condemned men sang; some fell to their knees and prayed for mercy. Some, like J.M. Mercer of Tampa, spent their last hours drinking heavily, which was allowed in those days. Mercer consumed 12 bottles of "Cuban wine" and asked for whiskey on the way to the scaffold, according to the Tampa Morning Tribune. Instead of inspiring awe and dread, public executions became public spectacles. Onlookers jostled afterward to buy souvenir strands of the hanging rope. Eventually the gruesome vulgarity surrounding public executions led some communities to screen them off from view. A 15-foot-high palisade was built around the scaffold in Dade County. In Jacksonville, hangings after 1901 were carried out behind the walls of the county jail. To avoid embarrassment, executions were taken indoors. What had been a spectacle became a sort of secret. Today even the electricity supplied to the chair is private. A large silver fuel tank can be glimpsed from the highway, next to a two-story building with opaque glass windows, when passing the Florida State Prison at Starke. It houses the prison generator. When a man is about to be electrocuted, the whole jail disconnects itself from the Florida Power & Light electrical grid and manufactures the lethal current itself. It is a precaution aimed at forestalling embarrassment should there be a power failure in the middle of an execution.

4 THE TRIPLE WHAMMY Lethal injection, by far the most popular method of capital punishment in the U.S. today (28 states use it; there have been 400 lethal injections since the method was introduced, 29 of them in the first trimester of 1999 alone), was proposed as long ago as 1888 by New York physician J. Mount Bleyer, who urged that six grains of morphine be injected in a condemned man's arm in order to rob him of the "hero status" that the gallows conferred. The father of modern lethal injection is Dr. Stanley Deutsch, who in 1977 chaired the Anesthesiology Department of Oklahoma University Medical School. In response to a call from Oklahoma state Sen. Bill Dawson for a cheaper alternative to repairing the state's derelict electric chair, Deutsch outlined a method of administering drugs through an intravenous drip so as to cause death rapidly and without pain. "Having been anaesthetised on several occasions with ultra-short-acting barbiturates and having administered these drugs for approximately 20 years, I can assure you that this is a rapid, pleasant way of producing unconsciousness," Deutsch wrote. That same year the Oklahoma Legislature voted to abandon its electric chair in favor of Deutsch's needle. Texas followed suit the same year, and the first execution by lethal injection took place there seven minutes after midnight, on the morning of Dec. 7, 1982, when Charles Brooks was put to death for the murder of secondhand car salesman David Gregory in Huntsville, Texas, in Brooks reportedly raised his head, clenched his fist, yawned and lapsed into unconsciousness almost instantly. He was pronounced dead nine minutes after the chemicals began to flow. Three agents are used in sequence, not simultaneously, in lethal injection. It is important that they not be mixed together, as they crystallize and clog the tubes. The dosage for all three is 15 to 50cc each. First a barbiturate, sodium thiopentol, renders the subject unconscious. The tube is then washed out with saline solution. Next pancuronium bromide, known as "Pavulon," is injected. A form of curare, Pavulon paralyzes the lungs. A second wash of saline solution cleanses the tube. Finally potassium chloride is injected. Potassium chloride reverses the electrical polarity of the heart muscles and stops the heart. By this point the subject is unconscious and should feel no pain. In some states injections are mechanized, the power supplied by a 12-volt battery. Two executioners - orderlies, not doctors - insert the needles, step back and each presses a button to activate the machine. If there is to be more than one execution, the sheet on the gurney is changed between each death. The whole scene - the orderlies, the needles, the tubes, the pricked vein, the sheets, the gurney - seem drawn from a hospital environment, deliberately bright, white and hygienic. It is as if therapy, not death, were being administered. Unfortunately, even this hospital-bright parody doesn't always unfold as scripted. Veins are often hard to find, since some condemned men are ex-addicts or diabetics whose veins have

5 long since collapsed. In the March 13, 1985, Texas execution of Stephen Peter Morin, technicians had to probe both arms and legs with needles for 45 minutes before they found a vein. It took 35 minutes to find Eliot Johnson's vein on June 24, 1987, in Texas. In Arkansas on Jan. 24, 1992, technicians took more than 50 minutes to find Ricky Ray Rector's vein. Tubes sometimes clog. It took 18 minutes to execute the notorious John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who had murdered 33 young men in Chicago, on May 10, The chemicals had gotten mixed up and had crystallized in the tubes. The procedure had to be interrupted. Tubes get kinked. On Sept. 12, 1990, in Illinois, Charles Walker's heart was still beating long after it should have stopped. The problem was a kink in the line. Emmitt Foster, executed May 3, 1995, in Missouri, was strapped so tightly to his gurney that the chemicals couldn't flow in his veins. He was still alive 30 minutes after he should have died. The straps had to be loosened so that Foster could die. In rare cases men have violent reactions to the chemicals. Justin Lee May was executed in Texas on May 7, "He went into a coughing spasm, groaned and gasped, lifted his head from the death chamber gurney and would have arched his back if he had not been belted down. After he stopped breathing, his eyes and mouth remained open," described Associated Press reporter Michael Graczyk, a witness. But it appears that Florida is unwilling to give up the death penalty, so the legislature will have to wrestle with an inherent contradiction: How do you turn untimely death, a thing that tends to be messy, smelly, awkward, shocking and error-prone, into something neat, quiet, dignified, odorless and foolproof? In November 1914, the Czech writer Franz Kafka wrote one of his most haunting short stories, In the Penal Colony, in which he describes the workings of an ingenious killing-machine called "The Harrow." Equipped with sharp needles, operating above a man strapped to a rotating table, the Harrow gradually etches a condemned man's crime into his back, deeper and deeper, over a 12-hour period, until he finally dies of his wounds. Unfortunately the Harrow is so intricate it keeps breaking down. Spare parts are unprocurable, so the device begins to stutter horribly, carving up its victim clumsily. "The machine was obviously going to pieces; its silent working was a delusion.... The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the bed was not turning the body over, but only bringing it up quivering against the needles... "This was plain murder," Kafka wrote.

Methods of Execution

Methods of Execution THOUGHT QUESTION: What is your definition of cruel and unusual punishment? How much pain is too much? To what do we owe the condemned? From 1976-October 2016: 1,264 - lethal injection