Electric chair unplugged

The Washington Post

Georgia’s highest court Friday banned the state’s use of the electric chair in the execution of condemned criminals, leaving only Alabama and Nebraska as the two states still allowing death by electrocution.

The 4-3 decision by the Georgia Supreme Court denounced the chair for “its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies.” The ruling said that death by such means inflicts “purposeless physical violence and needless mutilation that makes no measurable contribution to accepted goals of punishment.”

The state will automatically move to the use of lethal injection under a law passed by the Georgia legislature last year, corrections officials said. The court decision also means that the 128 men and one woman on Georgia’s death row who were originally sentenced to death by electric chair will now face death by lethal injection.

Death-penalty opponents praised the ruling as part of the nation’s ongoing re-evaluation of many aspects of capital punishment, including the execution of the mentally disabled and juveniles, quality of representation, and the availability of DNA testing.

“This is the end of the electric chair in Georgia, which during most of the 1900s had been one of the leading death penalty states, but it is also part of a broader review of the death penalty that is taking place in courtrooms, governors’ offices and state legislatures across the country,” said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The electric chair was first used in New York state in 1890 and reigned as the most popular form of execution in America for much of the 20th century, Dieter said.

Between 1900 and 1972, 4,223 inmates in the United States died in the electric chair, he said. The U.S. Supreme Court halted executions from 1972 to 1976. Since then, an additional 149 inmates have been put to death by electrocution. But most states have switched to lethal injection since it was introduced in Texas in 1982, he said, with 568 inmates executed so far by that method.

Several recent grisly cases, including one in Florida in which a plume of fire erupted from the prisoner’s head, escalated the fight to eliminate the chair.