Old Sparky

by Anthony Galvin

  Just forty years later there had been a complete change in public attitude. The Cork Examiner, in 1866, reported on the last public execution:

  Mr. O’Connor told a meeting of Cork Corporation that ‘the respectable residents of Sunday’s Well [where the prison was located] find appalling the spectacle of common criminals being publicly hanged in front of the jail.’ They agreed to await the results of a commission, now sitting in the USA, before coming to a conclusion. Executions were later brought inside the prison walls.

  The worldwide change in attitude was reflected within the United States. One of the results of evolving standards was the creation of the electric chair.

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  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 us
e 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 Fr
ance 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.”