The restrictions can lead to very clear and blatant miscarriages of justice, such as this one from the State of Virginia. Career criminal Joseph O’Dell was convicted of rape and murder in 1986. He was found guilty because tire tracks at the scene of the rape were consistent (not identical) with his truck, and blood stains found on his clothing were found to be “consistent” with the victim’s. This meant that they were similar types, not that they had been DNA matched. But O’Dell had been in a bar fight, which would also explain the blood samples.
After the trial, a blood test determined that the blood on his shirt did not belong either to him or to the murder victim. This knocked a vital plank out of the conviction. Within two years of his conviction, O’Dell had asked for DNA testing of semen found in the victim. This could prove conclusively his guilt or innocence, and unless he was certain of his innocence he would not have asked for the testing.
“If I were not innocent of this crime, I would have to be insane to request DNA fingerprinting,” is how he put it.
The prosecutor objected to the request and the court denied O’Dell’s appeal. In 1997 he was executed by lethal injection. Following the execution, his widow, backed by the Catholic Church and her legal team, asked that the semen sample and O’Dell’s jacket be released for DNA testing. The state objected, with an attorney saying, “People will shout from the rooftops that the Commonwealth executed an innocent man.”
Rather than have that happen, the judge declined to release the samples and agreed to a prosecution request that the evidence be instead burned. It was a disgraceful decision which demonstrated that saving face is often more important than serving the needs of transparent justice.
If America ever decides to give up on the death penalty, one of the big deciding factors in that decision will be the number of innocent people who face the needle and the chair every year. While the courts might be comfortable with that, many American citizens are clearly not.
18
INTO THE FUTURE
We began this book with the execution of Robert Gleeson in Virginia in January 2013. As he faced the chair, he shouted the Gaelic expression Póg mo thóin (“Kiss my ass”). He could have been shouting the epitaph of the electric chair itself. It is very unlikely that we will see another execution in Old Sparky. There are a number of reasons for this, but the chief one is that it is no longer seen as a humane alternative to hanging. Although it was brought in with good intentions, it was as easy to botch as the noose, and over the years has resulted in some horrific death chamber scenes. With a century of advances in technology, the chair has remained a static reminder of a more barbaric past. It has not been modernized at all. The only patent held on any part of the chair was held by Edwin Davis, the original New York State Electrician. The computer age has bypassed the chair.
It is possible that research could have been done to make the chair a guaranteed smooth and painless killing machine, but medical researchers are prevented by ethical considerations from turning their attention to ending life.
Since the lifting of the moratorium in 1976, botched electrocutions have continued to happen, horrifying the observers and officials. This is the chief reason that lethal injection has taken the place of electrocution, after a century, as the method of choice in America. The following ten cases illustrate why the electric chair has to be relegated to the dungeon of the past.
On August 10, 1982, Frank J. Coppola was put to death in Virginia. An attorney who was there said that it took two long jolts of electricity to kill Coppola. The first did not stop his heart. During the second fifty-five-second-long jolt, witnesses could hear the sound of sizzling flesh and Coppola’s head and leg both caught fire. Smoke filled the small death chamber, making it difficult to see the writhing victim through the haze.
When John Evans was executed in Alabama on April 22, 1983, sparks and flames flew from his leg, and sparks also came from the hood concealing his head. After the current was switched off, he was found to still have a pulse. The electrode was reattached to his leg and a second jolt was applied, resulting in more smoke and burning flesh, but not in death. A third jolt was required before his heart stopped beating. Evans was left charred and smoking after fourteen minutes.
When George Stephens was executed in Georgia on December 12, 1984, he proved to have a stubborn grip on life. The first two-minute jolt did not kill him, and when he was examined, his body temperature had risen sharply. He was left strapped to the chair, struggling to breath, for a further eight minutes until his flesh had cooled down sufficiently for a second attempt. According to the New York Times on the following day, a prison official explained the incident by saying, “Stephens was just not a conductor.”
One of the most prolonged and horrific executions took place on October 16, 1985, in Indiana. William Vandiver was still breathing after the first shock of 2,300 volts. Four more jolts had to be applied, over seventeen minutes, to secure his death. The death chamber was filled with smoke and with the odor of burning flesh; Vandiver’s attorney Herbert Shaps described the execution as “outrageous.” The Department of Corrections admitted that the execution had not gone according to plan.
Horace Dunkins Jr. was mildly retarded. He went to the chair in Alabama on July 14, 1989. It took two jolts, separated by nine minutes, to finish him off. After the first jolt failed to kill him, a guard said to witnesses, “I believe we’ve got the jacks on wrong.” (From the Birmingham News). This proved to be the case. The execution took nineteen minutes. Alabama Prison Commissioner Morris Thigpen said, “I regret very much what happened. The cause was human error.”
Jesse Joseph Tafero was electrocuted in Florida on May 4, 1990. His was an interesting case. He and his girlfriend Sunny Jacobs and her two children were passengers in a car driven by ex-con Walter Rhodes. They were stopped at a traffic stop and someone in the car shot and killed two police officers. Tafero was convicted. It was his gun, and the driver, Rhodes, testified against him. The gunshot residue evidence was that Rhodes had fired a gun and that Tafero and Jacobs had handled a recently fired gun. But the testimony of Rhodes swung the case against Tafero. Both Tafero and Jacobs were sentenced to death. Jacobs was the registered owner of the gun. She had purchased it for Tafero because he had a prison record and could not buy it himself.
The judge in the case was Daniel Futch Jr., known as “Maximum Dan” because of his harsh sentencing policies. He was a throwback to a less enlightened age. Once, on hearing the case against a man charged with beating a gay man to death he had joked, “That’s a crime now, to beat up a homosexual?” He was known to carry a gun under his robes in court and had a battery-powered toy electric chair on his desk. He sentenced Jacobs to death despite a recommendation for leniency from the jury, making her sentence unconstitutional.
After sentencing Tafero and Jacobs to the chair, he gave Rhodes three life sentences for his part in the crimes. Jacobs later had her sentence reduced to second-degree murder. On her release, she moved to Ireland where she married Peter Pringle—a terrorist who had once been sentenced to death in that country for shooting a police officer. The death penalty had not been carried out in Ireland since 1956 and is no longer legal there. Pringle was eventually exonerated of the crime.
Tafero had no such luck. He sat in the chair on May 4, 1990. Prison inmates later claimed that the sponges had been tampered with to make the execution more painful. Miami Herald reporter Ellen McGarrahan wrote: “I went to Florida State Prison and watched a man die. The man was Jesse Tafero, and his death was ugly, fire rising from his head as prison officials turned electricity off and on, each jolt setting a sponge on his shaved skull alight. As I watched, I wrote down the time that each bolt hit Tafero, for he was clearly still alive. His death started at 7:06 a.m., and ended at 7:13 a.m., by the clock on the prison wall. Seven minutes is a long time to watch someone burn.”
The case became a rallying call for death penalty opponents when Rhodes, the driver of the car, recanted his trial testimony a
nd admitted that he, not Tafero, had shot the two police officers with Jacobs’s gun.
The prolonged execution was put down to “inadvertent human error.” A synthetic sponge had been used instead of the natural one usually used.
On October 17, 1990, in Virginia, Wilbert Lee Evans went to the chair. As the first burst of electricity coursed through his body, blood spewed from the mask concealing his face. The blood drenched his shirt and caused a sizzling sound as it seeped over his lips. He could be heard to moan when the current was switched off, so a second jolt was administered. The autopsy confirmed that he had suffered a nose bleed when the voltage surge elevated his already high blood pressure.
On August 22, 1991, Derick Lynn Peterson was found to be alive after the administration of the jolt of electricity in Virginia. The doctor confirmed that there was a pulse and then waited a few minutes and checked again, still finding a pulse. Seven and a half minutes after the first shock, a second and fatal one was administered. Virginia officials decided after this execution to routinely administer two shocks before checking for a pulse.
The execution of Pedro Medina in Florida on March 25, 1997, was gruesome. A crown of flames, a foot high, danced over his head during the execution, filling the chamber with acrid smoke and choking the two dozen official witnesses in the next room. A panicked official manually threw the switch to cut off the power early, cutting short the two-minute cycle of 2,000 volts. But the prisoner was still clearly alive, his chest heaving as he struggled to draw in a breath in the smoke filled chamber, according to the Gainesville Sun. Medina had a long history of mental illness and there were questions of his innocence. Even the Pope had appealed for clemency, unsuccessfully.
The cause of the flames was either a corroded copper screen on the headpiece of the chair or the improper application of the sponge designed to conduct the electricity to the convict’s head.
Allen Lee Davis was a huge man—350 pounds. Florida had to build a new electric chair to accommodate his bulk. He was strapped into it on July 8, 1999. The execution was far from smooth. As the current flowed through him, blood began to pour in a stream from his mouth, dripping onto his shirt. By the end of the execution, the scarlet stain was the size of a dinner plate and had even seeped into the buckles on the leather chest strap holding him to the chair.
Those ten horror stories are symptomatic of why the electric chair has fallen out of favor. When considering a later appeal, Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw said, “The color photos of Davis depict a man who, for all appearances, was brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida.”
He added that when taken into account with the executions of Jesse Tafero and Pedro Medina, the executions were “barbaric spectacles more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state.”
Justice Shaw probably reflects the majority view of electrocution now in the United States. But it is not a universal view. Florida State Senator Ginny Brown-Waite witnessed the execution of Davis and saw it in a different light. As the blood flowed down Davis’s white shirt, it reached the crease where his chest met his lower abdomen and began to spread outwards, forming the shape of a very crude cross. She took this as a sign that God supported the execution. (Reported in the St. Petersburg Times).
The death penalty remains a deeply divisive and controversial topic in America, with as many supporting it as calling for its abolition. So what is the future?
One thing we can be fairly sure of is that we have seen the end of the electric chair. There may be one or two more state electrocutions over the next few years, but these will come to an end. It is possible that Robert Gleeson was the last; although every electrocution over the past few years has been hailed as the last. The only thing that could bring back the chair is a decline in lethal injections.
The current drugs shortage could cause this. In May 2014, the governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam, approved the reintroduction of the electric chair to that state, but only if the option of lethal injection was not available due to shortage of the drugs used. The electric chair is not an option in Tennessee, but a fallback position, to be used in emergencies. But Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said that this could pose a problem.
“There are states that allow inmates to choose [the electric chair] but it is a very different matter for a state to impose a method like electrocution. No other state has gone so far,” he told Associated Press. He said that legal challenges might arise if the state decided to go through with an electrocution. The state would have to prove that lethal injection drugs were not obtainable and there were concerns about the constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishments.
One of the main movers of the Tennessee bill was State Senator Ken Yager, who said the move was in response to “a real concern that we could find ourselves in a position that if the chemicals were unavailable to us that we would not be able to carry out the sentence.”
Some in Tennessee are uncomfortable with the return to the chair, including attorney David Raybin. His client, child-killer Daryl Holton, was executed on September 12, 2007, the last man in Tennessee to be electrocuted. It took ten minutes to strap the compliant prisoner securely in the chair, which was made from the wood of the old gallows decommissioned in 1916. Then:
Large wet sponges were placed between the metal contacts and Daryl’s skull so as to assure that the electricity had as little resistance as possible. The guards sopped up the excess salt water on the floor and put the wet towels into a bucket.
This process was done with absolute precision—not a movement wasted. This, in my view, was the torment. Mr. Holton was certainly not harmed in any way by the endless buckling of belts and the tucking in of moist sponges. I think the sensation of wetness, leather, and a dozen hands about his body must have been maddening. While the guards knew what came next, Daryl had no way of knowing and, I am sure, thought every moment was his last.
When all the water, towels, and buckets had been removed, the guards started leaving the room. I was then asked to go to the witness room. I took one last look at Daryl, since I knew that my next gaze of him would be from behind solid glass. His eyes were still closed, his breathing labored. As I would realize later, Daryl was starting to hyperventilate; he was frightened.
There he was. Daryl Holton was in the electric chair with this helmet on his head and salt water slowly trickling down his cheeks. In my imagination I believed the electric chair was weeping tears for its victim. At this point, Daryl was asked if he wanted a blindfold. He said yes. This was his last audible sound.
Moments later, the execution began:
We heard the whir of the exhaust fan in the death chamber. Five seconds later: BANG! A loud electrical noise. Daryl Holton convulsed and was pinned to the electric chair. A reporter jumped back in his chair as if shocked himself.
The impact of the voltage had to have killed Mr. Holton instantly. We will never know for sure, but it was dramatic. For fifteen seconds the current was applied. Then it was halted and Daryl’s body slumped over. Then silence. I looked in vain for any sign of life. Then: BANG! Another shock for some twenty seconds. Holton’s body convulsed again.
Mr. Raybin said the execution had not changed his view of capital punishment, which he favors in some extraordinary cases. “That said, what I had just seen was barbaric in the extreme. No medieval torture could be more bizarre. It demeans us as a society to have this electric chair execution on the books, much less to actually use it. The electric chair is a carnival of death which brings no dignity to the victim or our judicial system.”
Aside from Tennessee, seven other states still allow electrocution. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia—though in none of these states is it the default method. That remains lethal injection. Eight states allow for other alternatives to lethal injection. Arizona, Missouri, and Wyoming allow the gas chamber, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington all
ow hanging, and Oklahoma and Utah allow the firing squad. But in all those states, lethal injection is the default method.
With lethal injection facing problems, several states have considered what to do next, but none have joined Tennessee in opting for the chair. Wyoming is considering a return to the firing squad. Although limited scientific work has been done on execution methods, in 1938 a prisoner, John Deering, was strapped to a heart monitor during a firing squad execution in Utah. After the four shots entered his chest, his heart went into a spasm for four seconds and then stopped fifteen seconds after the shots. However his breathing continued for nearly a minute more, and he struggled briefly after his heart stopped beating. The experiment proved that firing squad is at least swift.
The unpalatable truth is that ending a life swiftly and painlessly is a medical procedure and doctors are not involved in the execution process. There is no prospect of that changing. In some countries that allow voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, doctors have developed protocols for ending life. But these involve a very gentle passage, with the patient slipping into a coma and sometimes dying hours, or even days, later. This is not a solution for executions, which are generally required to be quick and clinical.
Both electrocution and lethal injection can work very well. But they are anything but guaranteed. And when they go wrong, they can go very wrong. The only execution machine ever constructed that guarantees a swift and painless death is the French guillotine. But this looks barbaric, and the end result is a head bouncing off the floor and blood spraying all over the ground. Though it is very humane for the victim, it is considered too gory for the witnesses and officials and was rejected for that reason by the New York Electrical Death Commission in 1888. It would be rejected for the same reasons today. Death must be sanitized. It is in keeping with “evolving standards of decency in society.”
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