55 door, as indicated at “A,” and a second wall built up to the right side of the cell, indicated by “B.” This devides the building about the cell into two rooms, a small prisoner’s room and a large witness room. The small room contains the door
60 through which the prisoner enters the cell and the control apparatus for the executioner. Observation is possible from this small room through the single window at the right of the door. The remaining four windows open to the large witness room wherein the legally entitled
5 witnesses are assembled to witness the execution.
In Figs. 5 and 6 an alternate form of gas generator is illustrated. This form consists of an acid pot 55 open at its top and positioned between the two chairs in the cell 10.
A post 56 is secured to the floor adjacent the
10 pot 55. A lever 57 extends from the post to support a porous cyanide basket 53. The lever 57 is raised and lowered through the medium of toggel levers 59, which are secured on a shaft 60 extending, through a gas tight packing 61 to the
15 exterior of the cell. On the exterior an operating lever 62 is secured to the shaft, by means of which the basket 58 can be lowered and raised from the acid pot 55. This mechanism may replace the generating mechanism of the previous
20 form. The air intake and exhaust mechanism of the previous form are retained, however.
While a specific form of the improvement has been described and illustrated herein, it is desired to be understood that the same may be varied,
25 within the scope of the appended claims, without departing from the spirit of the invention.
Having thus described the invention, what is claimed and desired secured by Letters Patent is:
1. A device for evacuating and neutralizing an
30 execution chamber comprising: a suction fan for exhausting said gas from said chamber; an exhaust conduit adapted to connect said fan with said chamber; an exhaust valve for controlling the flow through said exhaust conduit; a fresh
35 air conduit for supplying fresh air to said chamber; a second valve controlling the flow through said latter conduit; an ammonia container; a conduit for carrying ammonia from said container to said chamber; a third valve controlling
40 the flow of ammonia through the latter conduit; and a single control lever operatively connected with all three valves for simultaneously opening them so that fresh air and ammonia will flow into said chamber simultaneously with the exhausting
45 of the gas therefrom.
2. Means for evacuating and neutralizing the gas in an execution chamber comprising: a fresh air conduit adapted to communicate with said chamber; an air valve for controlling the flow through said conduit; a reservoir for containing
50 a neutralizing agent; a neutralizing pipe leading from said reservoir and communicating with said conduit between said air valve and said chamber; a neutralizing valve controlling the flow through
55 said neutralizing pipe; means for operating said air and neutralizing valve simultaneously so that the neutralizing agent will be applied to the air as it flows to said chamber; and means for causing the air to flow through said conduit to
60 chamber.
EARL C. LISTON.
APPENDIX 2
PERSONS EXECUTED BY LETHAL GAS IN THE UNITED STATES, BY STATE, 1924–1999
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS IN NOTES
ADS—Arizona Daily Star
AJS—American Journal of Sociology
AM—American Mercury
AR—Arizona Republican
CA—Chemical Age
CCDA—Carson City Daily Appeal
CLJDN—Clarion Ledger/Jackson Daily News
DI—Dearborne (Michigan) Independent
DP—Denver Post
FB—Fresno Bee
GDG—Gastonia (North Carolina) Daily Gazette
HMH—Hagerstown Monthly Herald
JAH—Journal of American History
JAMA—Journal of the American Medical Association
JCPT—Jefferson City Post-Tribune
JIEC—Journal of Industrial Engineering Chemistry
KCS—Kansas City Star
LADJ—Los Angeles Daily Journal
LAHE—Los Angeles Herald Examiner
LAT—Los Angeles Times
LD—Literary Digest
NCHQ—North Carolina Historical Quarterly
NHSQ—Nevada Historical Society Quarterly
NSJ—Nevada State Journal
NYEW—New York Evening World
NYHT—New York Herald Tribune
NYT—New York Times
OSE—The Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner
OT—Oakland Tribune
PEG—Phoenix Evening Gazette
PG—Phoenix Gazette
PR—Pioche Record
REG—Reno Evening Gazette
RGJ—Reno Gazette Journal
RMN—Rocky Mountain News
RNO—Raleigh News & Observer
RR—Rawlins Republican
RRB—Rawlins Republican-Bulletin
SB—Sacramento Bee
SDU—San Diego Union
SDUT—San Diego Union-Tribune
SFC—San Francisco Chronicle
SFCP—San Francisco Call & Post
SFE—San Francisco Examiner
SJMH—San Jose Mercury Herald
SMT—San Mateo Times
SSS—Social Studies of Science
TC—Tucson Citizen
TDC—Tucson Daily Citizen
TDT—Tahoe Daily Tribune
TT—Tonopah Daily Times
UCLR—University of Colorado Law Review
USPHR—U.S. Public Health Reports
WP—Washington Post
WSJ—Winston-Salem Journal
INTRODUCTION
1. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 93.
2. Informed but brief mention of the lethal chamber and Nevada’s first gassing appears in Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), p. 258.
3. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, reprint (New York: Robert Schalkenback Foundation, 1970), pp. 58–60, 289–90.
4. Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909), p. 35. Galton’s conception is discussed in Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 11.
5. Black, War Against the Weak, p. 21.
6. Stern, Eugenic Nation, pp. 16–17.
7. “Exterminating Agent for Vermin,” filed by Gerhard Peters, Application May 26, 1939, Serial No. 276,021, in Germany, June 7, 1938, patent 2,344,105, U.S. Patent Office, March 14, 1944.
8. Friedlander, Origins of Nazi Genocide, p. 93.
9. See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Claude Ribbe, Napoleon’s Crimes: A Blueprint for Hitler (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), originally published in French as Le Crime de Napoléon in 2005.
10. State of Nebraska v. Mata, N.W.2d _, filed Feb. 8, 2008, No. S-05–1268; Adam Liptak, “Electrocution Is Banned in Last State to Rely on It,” NYT, February 9, 2008.
11. Linda Greenhouse, “Justices to Enter the Debate over Lethal Injection,” NYT, September 26, 2007; Baze v. Rees, No. 07–5439.
12. Professor Denno quoted in Rob Egelko, “Supreme Court to Review Lethal Injection Methods,” SFC, September 26, 2007.
13. Baze v. Rees, 553 U.S. _ (2008).
14. Recent histories of the electric chair include Richard Moran, The Executioner’s Current (New York: Knopf, 2003); Jill Jonnes, Empires of Light (New York: Random House, 2004); Mark Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death (New York: Walker & Co., 2003); and Craig Brandon, The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History (Jefferson, N
C: McFarland & Co., 1999).
15. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 5; Tony Platt and Paul Takagi, eds., Punishment and Penal Discipline (San Francisco: Crime and Social Justice, 1980), p. 13; Rusche, “Labor Market and Penal Sanction: Thoughts on the Sociology of Criminal Justice,” trans. Gerda Dinwiddie, Crime & Social Justice (Fall/Winter 1978): 5. For a brief discussion of some of the rationales and theories of criminal punishment, see Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp. 309–13.
16. Rusche and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure, p. 5.
17. In 1922 Schweitzer delivered the Dale Memorial Lectures at Oxford University, and from them the following year appeared volumes 1 and 2 of his great work, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization and Civilization and Ethics. In 1936 he published the article “Reverence for Life” in the periodical Christendom 1 (1936): 225–39.
18. David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 153.
19. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 95.
20. Garland, Punishment and Modern Society, pp. 106–9.
21. Ibid., chapters 6 and 7.
22. Jürgen Habermas, “Learning by Disaster? A Diagnostic Look Back on the Short 20th Century,” Constellations 5(3) (1998): 307–20.
1. ENVISIONING THE LETHAL CHAMBER
1. Claude Bernard (1813–78), De l’emploi de l’oxyde de carbone pour la détermination de l’oxygène au sang (Compt. rend. de l’Acad. des sciences, meeting of September 6, 1858, vol. 47).
2. Peter D. Bryon, Comprehensive Review in Toxicology for Emergency Technicians (London: Informa Heath Care Press, 1996), p. 352. “Cyanide” refers to “a large number of compounds that contain the negatively charged cyanide ion: CN-. This ion consists of one carbon atom triple-bonded to one nitrogen atom. The negative charge primarily rests on the carbon atom. Cyanide can be found both as a gas and as a salt. When bound to hydrogen, it’s referred to as hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and is a gas at room temperature. When bound to ions like sodium (Na+) or Potassium (K+), it’s a salt and is a water-soluble solid. Its name varies depending on the ion it binds. KCN is potassium cyanide, for example” (Brian Harmon, “Technical Aspects of the Holocaust: Cyanide, Zyklon-B, and Mass Murder,” 1994, http://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/auschwitz/cyanide/cyanide.001 [accessed September 11, 2007]).
3. “Executions at the Dog Pound,” NYT, June 26, 1874.
4. J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 66.
5. Benjamin Ward Richardson, “On the Painless Extinction of Life in the Lower Animals,” Scientific American Supplement 476 (February 14, 1885). See also Edwin Black’s excellent history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), chapter 13. Black is practically the only American historian to date who has written in any detail about the significance of the lethal chamber.
6. When present in the air, carbon dioxide usually has no noticeable effect on humans at only 1–2 percent, but at 3 percent it causes breathing to become slightly more difficult, and at 5–6 percent it causes marked panting and headache. At 10 percent there is extreme distress, and at 15 percent humans often slip into partial unconsciousness with narcotic poison effects. At 18 percent suffocation and death can occur, and at 25 percent or more rapid death.
7. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905).
8. Robert Reid Rentoul, Race, Culture; or, Race Suicide? (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1906), pp. 178, 179. See also Rentoul, “Proposed Sterilization of Certain Mental Degenerates,” AJS 12(3) (November 1906): 319–27.
9. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922), p. 144.
10. Black, War Against the Weak, p. 248.
11. These developments are outlined in ibid., pp. 247–50.
12. Scott Christianson, “Bad Seed or Bad Science? The Story of the Notorious Jukes Family,” NYT, February 8, 2003.
13. Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf” (Politics as a Vocation), a lecture he gave in 1919, in Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. and trans. P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944).
14. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: NAACP, 1919; reprint, Negro Universities Press, 1969), pp. 7, 30–31, 45. See also Charles J. Ogletree and Austin D. Sarat, eds., From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
15. Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1984 (Rockville, MD: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, December 1986), p. 217. From 1890 to 1984 a total of 8,516 persons were legally executed and 3,543 were illegally lynched. About three-quarters of those lynched in that period were black. Although about 90 percent of those executed under state authority were executed for homicide, only 41 percent of those lynched were for homicide (ibid., 9).
16. Governor David Hill’s inaugural address, January 6, 1885, David B. Hill Papers, New York State Library, Albany.
17. Richard Moran, The Executioner’s Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 248 n39.
18. R. Ogden Doremus, Clark Bell, J. Mount Bleyer, Charles F. Stillman, and Frank H. Ingram, “Report of the Committee on Best Method of Executing Criminals,” The Medico-Legal Journal 5(1) (1888): 427–41. Bleyer is described in Moran, Executioner’s Current, pp. 72–74.
19. Allan McLane Hamilton (1848–1919), Recollections of an Alienist: Personal and Professional (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1916).
20. Letter from Governor James G. Scrugham to Dr. J. W. Kime of Boulder Lodge Sanitarium, Fort Dodge, Iowa, April 9, 1924, in Governor Scrugham Papers, Nevada State Archives, Carson City, Nevada.
21. Moran, Executioner’s Current, p. 110.
22. Quoted in “A New Form of Death Penalty,” NYT, December 15, 1896.
23. Henry M. Boies, Prisoners and Paupers: A Study of the Abnormal Increase of Criminals, and the Public Burden of Pauperism in the United States; the Causes and Remedies (New York: Putnam’s, 1893), pp. 292–93.
24. W. Duncan McKim, Heredity and Human Progress (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), pp. 120, 168.
25. “72,000 Cats Killed in Paralysis Fear,” NYT, July 26, 1916.
26. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916). Grant’s book later found an ardent fan in Adolf Hitler.
27. Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1948), pp. 58–60.
28. Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
29. William J. Robinson, Eugenics, Marriage, and Birth Control (New York: The Critic and Guide Company, 1917), pp. 74–76.
30. Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. 184.
31. Allan McLane Hamilton, Recollections of an Alienist, Personal and Professional (New York: George H. Doran, 1916), pp. 380–89.
2. FASHIONING A FRIGHTFUL WEAPON OF WAR
1. Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 3.
2. Anthony R. Hossack, first published in Everyman at War, edited by C. B. Purdom (New York: Dutton, 1930).
3. Rev. O. S. Watkins, quoted in Amos A. Fries and Clarence J. West, Chemical Warfare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1921), p. 13.
4. Daniel Charles, Master Mind: the Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York: Ecco, 2005), pp. 162–63.
5. “Mars in White Smock,” Time, March 8, 1937.
6. Curt Wachtel, Chemical Warfare (Brooklyn, NY: Chemical Publishing, 1941), p. 21.
7. “Mars in White Smock.”
8. Fries and West, Chemical Warfare, p. 14.
9. Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 10.
10. See Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (New York: Harmony Books, 2008).
11. Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History (New York: Knopf, 1987), quoted in James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 63.
12. Charles, Master Mind, p. 152. For more on Fritz Haber (1868–1934), see Morris Goran, The Story of Fritz Haber (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967).
13. Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 18.
14. See Ludwig Fritz Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
15. Michael Pattison, “Scientists, Inventors and the Military in Britain, 1915–19,” SSS 13(4) (November 1983): 526–27.
16. Gerhard Baader, Susan E. Lederer, Morris Low, Florian Schmaltz, and Alexander V. Schwerin, “Pathways to Human Experimentation, 1933–1945; Germany, Japan and the United States,” Osiris, 2nd series, vol. 20, Politics and Science in Wartime: Comparative International Perspectives in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (2005), p. 212.
17. See Charles Howard Foulkes, Gas! The Story of the Special Brigade (London: William B. Blackwood & Sons, 1936); Donald Richter, Chemical Soldiers: British Gas Warfare in World War I (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992).
18. Daniel Patrick Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in the United States During World War I,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1969, pp. 68–73, quoted in Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 44.
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