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.
METHOD EIGHT: STONING
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.
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