November 4, 2025 • 38 mins
In this first episode of a three-part series on lethal injection in the United States, guest hosts Steve Monacelli and Dr. Michael Phillips describe the futile quest for a “humane” form of execution, from the 1600s to the present day. They explore how each one has turned out to be extremely violent, prompting authorities to move such “gruesome spectacles” out of public view. Finally, they describe how the prospect of a televised execution in the electric chair led to the lethal injection protocol, pioneered by Texas in 1982.
Sources:
Corinna Barrett Lain, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection (New York: New York University Press, 2025.)
Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2025.)
Austin Sarat, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Colz Media a warning this episode includes violent content which
some listeners might find disturbing.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the
co author with longtime journalists Betsy Freeoff, of the history
of eugenics in Texas called a Purifying Knife.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And I'm Stephen Monchelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes
covering political extremism and far right internet culture for publications
like The Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire and others.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
On December seventh, nineteen eighty two, the state of Texas
made history in a particularly grim way. It became the
first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner
to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to
make the grizzly business of executing murderers swift and humane.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions,
and by extension, the general public, that what they were
watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban
on Cruel and Unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is
based on junk science, and those who die that way,
(01:18):
may actually suffer more and over a longer time than
prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed
to hide from the public that their government is torturing
prisoners to death. As the University of Richmond law professor
Brenna Lane, the author of recently published book Secrets of
the Killing State, The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only
does one thing, well only one, and that is it
hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence
of the death penalty, of what state killing actually is.
And I remember reading it's not in the book. I
(02:05):
kind of wish it I had put it in there,
but I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctantly.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Over the next three episodes of it could happen here,
we're going to examine the shady business of state killing.
We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and
the unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about
the untrained personnel who carry out the executions, and how
pressure from drug companies who didn't want their products associated
with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and
(02:33):
elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
We'll also talk about the pain the condemns suffer and
speak with people who have accompanied those sends to death
and their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood,
who as of this broadcast, has been the last friend
of ten men as they died by state command.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
It's incredibly strange to see someone who up to machines
that look like they're there to support life, and yet
you know that they're there to take his life.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Well, tell the story of one heroic Texas man, Rays Bouyon,
who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime,
but fought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker,
who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September eleventh
in two thousand and one and committed two Dallas area
murders in a shooting spree.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Well, definitely the execution that goes not about victims, because
the victims and the victims' family members requested and also
fault for clemency. You know why you went ahead and
requested the Governor of Texas, the Board of burdens and
earls that do not execute him in our names, you know,
show Marci, but looks like you know, we are not
(03:52):
in the same page. The system wanted to move forward,
so it was not in our names. It was basically
just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running,
sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution
is actually going to help the society, How is going
(04:12):
to help people.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Finally, will look at the future of the death penalty,
which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as
politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore
this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages
from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers
of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
The founders of the British colonies that became the United
States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital
punishment prevalent in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Their royal
executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them
at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them
limb from limb, sawing them in half and beheading them.
(05:07):
Such elaborate executions were meant to underscore the absolute power
of monarchs, as the political scientist Austin Sarat noted in
his book grew some spectacles, botched executions and America's death
penalty quote. Capital punishment was precisely about the right of
the state to kill as it pleased. Live, but lived
(05:27):
by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that
your life belongs to the state. However, even before the
American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less
exotic forms of capital punishment. In sixteen oh eight, authorities
in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being
a spy for the Spanish Empire. That was the first
(05:50):
execution in the British colonies in North America that later
became part of the United States. Inspired by the Old Testament.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Legal code, the thirteen British Colonies put prisoners to death
for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing food or horses,
killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, sodomy, adultery,
statutory rape, perjury, in a capital trial, insurrection, trees in manslaughter,
and of course, murder.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs. In
seventeen eighty nine, the First Congress of the United States
submitted to the States the Eighth Amendment to the United
States Constitution, which banned quote cruel and unusual punishments. The
required number of states ratified the amendments seventeen ninety one.
(06:39):
From colonial times until the first use of the electric
chair in New York in eighteen ninety, condemned prisoners in
the United States usually died at the end of a
hangman's rope. More than half the Essamey's sixteen thousand executions
in all of US history had been by hanging. Hanging
was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance,
(06:59):
skinning prisoners alive.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like
Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit
the crimes and that no one was executed for relatively
minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in seventeen ninety four, several
states such as Vermont, Maryland, and New Hampshire sharply reduced
the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty.
(07:24):
Perhaps not surprisingly, the South went in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved
African Americans they bought, sold, rape, whipped, and relentlessly forced
to work without pay. Whites reported laying sleepless at night
imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their
crimes they wanted the African Americans they so abused to
fear of the consequences of any form of resistance.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
After repeated failed rebellions from seventeen oh four to eighteen
thirty one, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw
the death of many, if not all, slave owners in Haiti,
legislators in the South greatly expanded the range of offenses
for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies
could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans,
(08:15):
who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any
experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition. In Europe, enslave
men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to
escape their captivity, faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons.
This legacy of violence in the South contributed to the
region's long term love affair with capital punishment.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
However, even hangings from it as a kindly our way
to kill became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were
trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience. In
the United States, such killings were done by local officials,
often sheriffs, who might have little or no experience at
the gallows. Executioners had to do some complicated math in
(08:59):
order to do their jobs correctly. They had to calculate
the weight of the victim and ratio to the length
of the rope, and the likely speed at which the
condemned prisoner would drop through the trapdoor at the bottom
of the gallows. If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's
neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically
killing the unfortunate victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be
(09:23):
clean and efficient, like the hanging carried out by the
US Army at the beginning of the movie The Dirty Dozen.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
What did you think of the hanging? Look very efficient?
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly,
was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove.
For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious
rituals revolved and evolved around these events, with notable exceptions.
Before the noose was placed around their necks, the condemned
(09:57):
told the sad tale of what led them to such
a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged
God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the
death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however,
often strayed from this script.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Pretty early on, the leaders of the American Republic realized
that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most
of them continued to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed
the Declaration of Independence to cry what he called the
death penalties quote brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the
earliest voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that
(10:37):
state violence made ordinary citizens more violent, and there's reason
to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that often watched
hangings and got drunk, and sometimes fights broke out as
witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows. Postcards
and mementoes were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas,
(10:58):
and fights sometimes result in injury or death. Some of
the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning
somber moral lessons, but in fact picking the pockets of
other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding on the gallows,
and executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson assaults,
another mayhem, as the public would engage in writing, not
(11:19):
unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's win
at the World Series. These unruly mobs unnerved the upper
class in Starting with Rhode Island in eighteen thirty three,
states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from
the public view. By eighteen forty five, public executions had
been banned in all of New England. This upset death
(11:40):
penalty abolitionists, who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded
during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment.
Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people
in the name of the public, and a process shrouded
in secrecy.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills.
Will be back after a few words from our sponsors.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
In eighteen ninety nine, in Samson County, North Carolina, a
local hothead named Art Kinsall's got into a heated exchange
with a neighbor, John c. Herring, at a country store.
During the fight, Kinsalls grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly
stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was
arrested for the murder, but he escaped. He was on
(12:35):
the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a
sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty,
and sentenced to die by hanging. There the story got messy.
We'll repeat what we're about to say may be upsetting
to some listeners. Kinsall's was not one to passively accept
his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take
(12:58):
his own life twice, time with sleeping pills and the
second time by cutting his own throat. These attempts delayed
the execution, but inevitably Kinsalls faced his appointment with the hangmen.
On September twenty eighth, nineteen hundred, local authorities used a
step ladder as gallows. Kinsalls did not fall from a
sufficient height to break his neck. Consequently, and the neck
(13:20):
wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so
he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose.
A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified
spectators that Kinsal's was still alive. Officers cut him down
and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time
he died. In an era in which executions took place
(13:41):
all the time, Kinsaw's gory death cut through the fog
and made national news. The Virginia Pilot called the scene revolting.
During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common.
Sometimes because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoners heads were yanked off.
Sometimes ropes ripped apart, with the prisoner falling to the ground,
(14:03):
only to be hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned
slowly strangled to death.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
John Harris, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in nineteen thirteen,
actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one
newspaper quote, prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution, According
to an estimate made in nineteen ninety three by illegal
team representing a client who was facing death by hanging.
In Washington State, between the years sixteen twenty two and
(14:32):
nineteen ninety three, authorities bungled one hundred and seventy of
about eight thousand legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering
for the prisoners in more than two percent of the
death sentences carried out by this technique.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
The growing middle class and upper class in the United
States became squeamish about hanging. As one writer put it,
bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of death itself, but
not in competence and miss management. By the early eighteen eighties,
the New York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed and
(15:06):
graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong. In eighteen eighty five,
in response in mounting public concerns, New York Governor David
Bennett Hill declared, the present mode of executing criminals by
hanging has come down to us from the dark ages.
It may well be questioned whether the science of the
present day cannot provide a means of taking the life
(15:27):
of those condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.
As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew
among elites, the New York Medico Legal Society first suggested
research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal
injection in the eighteen seventies, but a different technology arose
that delayed the advent of that protocol by more than
(15:49):
a century. Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man took
credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistance, who
toiled as menlo New Jersey lif oborratory. Edison was also
a genius of public relations, and he would come to
dominate several industries. In the early eighteen seventies, his team
had developed a feasible incandescent light bulb that ran on
(16:12):
the direct current or DC system, as Edison himself described it.
Speaker 6 (16:17):
On October twenty first, eighteen excepty what rumors, experiments resulted
in the production of a small unit map up comparatively
enormous resistance the pilipment the another conditions of great stability.
After the result, I knew the problem approached commercial solution.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
In eighteen seventy nine, Edison submitted his patent for an
electric lamp. In eighteen eighty the Edison Illuminating Company opened
for business and soon provided lights for New York and
other cities. In the early days of the electric industry,
fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In
eighteen eighty one, George Lemuel Smith, if an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer,
(17:02):
stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself
by touching a generator.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
An autopsy led some doctors to conclude that Smith died
quickly and painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to
Smith's untimely death, but suggesting that perhaps electric power could
provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid
society of convicted murderers and rapists enter a Buffalo.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Dentist Alfred Porter Southwick and doctor George Fell of the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who both
experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current.
The early results were often horrifying, with the animals sometimes
burning live. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described
electrocution as the quote safest and kindest method of killing.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
In eighteen eighty six, New York State formed a commission
the study of prisoners could humanly be put to death.
In a similar way, the so called Jerry Commission falsely
claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments
died spuzzledly, rapidly, and efficiently. Thomas Edison would soon see
a business opportunity in state killing. At the time, Edison
(18:14):
was locked in a so called current war with another
robber barren business tycoon, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's labs had developed
a system that ran on alternating current, or AC, a
system that was more efficient, more popular, and less prone
to break down. Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions,
but the so called Wizard of Menlo Park wanted to
(18:35):
prove that the much safer Westinghouse system was in fact dangerous.
Edison had his engineer's electrocute animals using the AC current
in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system.
His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the State
of New York to hook up its first electric chair,
invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick.
(18:57):
And Edison connected that chair too an AC power system.
The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler,
who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet
during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to die
by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity for Kemler to die
in agony as the first man killed in an electric chair,
(19:20):
in order to fatally damage Westinghouse's reputation and that of
the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being
associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of
his AC generators to New York State out of fear
that they would be used to execute Kemler, but Edison
sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended
(19:41):
up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly
hired an attorney for Kemler, but the appeals failed. At
six point thirty eight in the morning August sixth, eighteen ninety,
Kemler became an unwilling pioneer.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by
keml calm demeanor, as he wished everyone in the death
chamber good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair.
The executioner pulled a switch and Kemler's body convulsed and
became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead.
Kemler started to drool, and a second jolt was ordered.
(20:18):
Kemler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose
in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described
as a quote pungent and sickening odor.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemler's agonizing death, they would have
done better with an axe. The mayhem didn't matter. In essence,
plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success
and stuck with the method for decades to come. Twenty
six other states adopted the electric chair as a method
of execution. Kemler's death would be the first of many
(20:51):
so called botched executions over the next century. As Austin
Sarat wrote in Gruesome Spectacles, eighty of the executions gone
around in the next century involved the electric chair, with
the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others resulting
in fire, smoke the smell of burning flesh. In a
prolonged period from the start to the completion.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death,
the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison
guards often caught blisters if they touched the body too soon.
In nineteen twenty three, a man named F. G. Bullen
would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the
same day. Prison officials actually placed him in a casket,
(21:35):
thinking he was dead, when a guard noticed he was
still breathing. Bullan was then carried back to the chair
and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Before the start of the twentieth century, critics knew that
both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity.
In the Lone Star State, ferinand Eugene Daniel, the editor
of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of EUJA
nnix an opponent of capital punishment. He argued that cash
straining men from families with criminal histories would be a
(22:06):
way to prevent criminals from being born in the first place.
Cash straining criminals as more Eumani said, than a hanging
or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to
a life of crime. Daniel accepted that executions would take
place for the foreseeable future, say one to make the
death penalty a vehicle for medical research instead of hanging
(22:29):
or electrocuting prisoners. Daniel suggested in a nineteen oh six
issue of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should
sedate them and, while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments.
Quote inject into him various disease germs. Watched their progress
and went through with him. Inject about ten drops of
prussic acid into the veins of his arms, and he
(22:50):
will die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Doctor Joseph Mengela
and other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little
more than three d yas d later. But as Professor
Lane explained to us, even before doctor Daniel made his
disturbing suggestion in the Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that
death by lethal injection would be a horrifying experience.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
When states turned from hanging to the electric chair. This
is back in eighteen ninety There was actually a study.
There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair,
and that report actually considered death by drugs a lethal injection.
(23:34):
And in that report they said, we considered and rejected this,
and they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Professor Lane noted that even in the nineteenth century, doctors
knew that the criminal population had a higher tendency towards
drug abuse and poor health that would make it difficult
to access a vein with a needle in order to
deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, doctors were
queasy about involvement and executions that violate the Hippocratic Oath,
(24:07):
which says, in part I will do no harm or
injustice to patients, or quote a minister a poison to
anyone when asked to do so, nor will I suggest
such a course. Professor Lane noted that a government commission
studying lethal injection late nineteenth century prophetically said that not
only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue,
(24:29):
but so with the likely refusal of doctors that take
part because of ethical concerns. This could mean that lethal
injection would be carried out biamates.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
So you know, these people have notoriously bad things. They
are elderly, they are of poor health, they are often
former drug users. You know, how did we know this
in eighteen ninety and didn't think about this in nineteen
seventy seven. Now, that was one reason. The other reason
(25:02):
was they said, we're not going to be able to
do this without the medical profession. We're not going to
be able to do it competently. And the sustained and
strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
There were other less popular alternatives to hanging in the
electric chair in the nineteen hundreds. In nineteen twenty four,
Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a
gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of straight pets and animal
shelters provided a model for human executions, and again there
were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the
(25:38):
poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The
big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of
the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the
chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in danger.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
As with the electric chair death penalty, advocates claimed that
the modern technology had provided a guilt free method for
the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther
from the truth. Doctor Richard Traitsman from John Hopkins University
School of Medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing
pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the
(26:16):
pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where
essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poisoned gas
as their preferred method of execution, but witnesses consistently reported
the condemned seemed to die acctizing struggling deaths in which
they convulsed and wretched and sometimes screamed. In nineteen sixty,
California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous
(26:45):
acclaimed books. While on death row. Before his execution, Chessman
told reporters who would witness his death that he would
nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while
he was gassed. Reporters said that Chessman indeed nodded his
head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
By the time at Chessman's death, the United States was
less than a decade from the longest pause and executions
in its history. Numerous judicial challenges the capital punishment based
on numerous racial biases police misconduct and other issues resulted
in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid
nineteen sixties. That issue was the obvious racism of the
(27:26):
death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and
who ended up the target of state killing. As Brian Stevenson,
a New York University law professor and the founder and
executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explained in two
thousand and seven.
Speaker 7 (27:42):
In the United States, we are struggling with capital punishment
and its implementation a short quick legal history. In nineteen
seventy two, the United States Supreme Court struck down the
death penalty after recognizing that it was being applied in
an arbitrary manner. The Court in seventy two noted that
eighty seven ven percent of the people executed for the
crime of rape were black men convicted of raping white women.
(28:05):
One hundred percent of the people executed in the United
States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy two for the
crime of rape were executed for offenses involving victims who
were white, even though it was believed that women of
color were three times as likely to be the victims
of sexual assault.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
That racism would play a major factor in the largest
pause and executions in the history of the American death penalty.
The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund in the ACLU filed challenges
to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country,
and these legal teams won numerous stays of execution. As
(28:41):
Harvard law professor Kel Steiker observed in a YouTube video,
a de facto ban of executions had taken place by
the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 8 (28:50):
The death penalty was in decline already in the nineteen
sixties in the United States, as it was in Europe,
but the ldf's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt,
so from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy two. In
the five years prior to the decision in Furman versus Georgia,
there weren't no executions in the United States.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Three death penalty cases, Furman versus Georgia, Jackson versus. Georgia,
and Branch versus. Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court
and were consolidated in nineteen seventy two. All three defendants
were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with
raping white women As previously noted, no white man had
ever been executed for the rape of an African American
(29:36):
woman or child in American history. In June nineteen seventy two,
the US Supreme Court issued a five to four decision
in Firman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death
penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then
practiced was unconstitutional.
Speaker 8 (29:51):
So that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or
reason to it. To use the words that they used,
it was wantonle and freakishly imposed. The immediate aftermath of
Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death,
and there were some six hundred ish people on death
(30:11):
row at the time of the Firman litigation, all had
their death penalties invalidated, so they were all sent to
the general population. They had to be re sentenced to
a sentence other than death. Moreover, when the Supreme Court
struck down the death penalty as it then existed, anyone
whose death sentence was pending that case had to be
(30:31):
dropped because those statutes were no longer valid.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
No executions took place for another four years. The Supreme
Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries
were given in capital cases were too vague. This gave
states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws.
By nineteen seventy six, thirty five states that adopted new
statues addressing the issues raised in Furman. On July second,
(30:59):
nineteen teen seventy six, in its greg versus Georgia decision,
the Supreme Court, by a seven to two margin, upheld
the death penalty. In states like Texas, where the Court
found jury instructions were clear and specific, the death penalty
were set to resume after a decade long pause. It
took a mere one hundred and ninety nine days for
(31:20):
state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer, Gary Gilmore,
by firing squad on January seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired in nineteen
seventy nine Pultzer Prize winning journalism based novel called The
Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of
capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless,
the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a
problem as Professor Lane writes the Oklahoma electric chair was
(31:53):
falling apart and needed to be repaired, but by the
nineteen seventies, many legislators were put off by the brutality
of that execution method and sought something more modern.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to
allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district
court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That
injunction was later overturned, but politicians across the country were
unnerved as a prospect of the public watching a man
(32:25):
essentially burn alive in their names and what that could
do to support for the death penalty.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
It was at this time that a member of the
Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for
help and designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection.
Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently like
veterinarians euthanizing animals, but doctors wanted nothing to do with
killing people. That's when Oklahoma State corner doctor J. Chapman
(32:52):
stepped in, Referring to the physicians who refused to help,
he said, quote, to hell with them, let's do this.
Professor Lane explained what happened next.
Speaker 9 (33:01):
A document in the book, legislators talking about, how, you know,
I don't know that the country's going to want to
see this sort of violence.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
All we've got is the electric chair, all we've got
is the gas chamber. People are going to be, you know,
queasy about this, and we need to find a different way.
Speaker 10 (33:21):
And unknown to many, or at least I appreciate it,
is the fact that a federal court had recognized at
the time a First Amendment right to televise executions.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Now it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that.
And so one of the things I also found was
state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't you know, we
can't have an electrocution in someone's living room, right. The
public is not going to go for this, And so
they were they were looking for a different way. They
talked about, you know what about a death by drugs?
(33:57):
And they are asking the Statement Medical Association, they're asking
their personal doctors, they're asking everybody they can find. No
one wants to play, but they get to and this
is in Oklahoma. They get to the state Medical examiner
doctor J. Chapman, and he refers to himself as an
(34:18):
expert in tet bodies, but not in how to get
them that way.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
In spite of his self confessed ignorance, Chapman made up
out of thin air the three drug protocol that would
be used in executions across the country for the next
three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but
decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be
even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in order sodium theopental,
(34:45):
which was designed to kill like a barbituate overduse, pan
coronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing,
and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or
into how they interacted with each other, and neither did
the state of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this,
Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by
every single state that had the death penalty. Laine described
her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman, who
seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this
(35:22):
execution method.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
And I later came across an interview of him where
they asked, you know, how did you come up with
the three drug protocol that every state used, every single
state for thirty five forty years, And he said, I
didn't do any research.
Speaker 11 (35:41):
I just thought about what might be useful, what you
might need. You wanted two drugs so that if one
didn't kill him, the other did. And then the interviewer said, well,
why did you add a third drug?
Speaker 3 (35:52):
And he said, why not? I didn't do any research.
Why does it matter why I chose it? He makes
it up and the state of Oklahoma adopts it basically
in an afternoon, No expert testimony, no committee hearings, no
review of the medical science, veterinary literature, nothing, and.
Speaker 10 (36:17):
It takes hold and all of the other states blindly
follow it.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he
had done any research, you would have found the components
of his three drug protocol worked at cross purposes. Anesthesiologists
believe that the amountain speed at which the sodium theapentall
is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough
for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's happening
(36:44):
to them. Meanwhile, the sodian theapent hall also slows down
blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of
the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer
a racing heart but not have a fatal heart attack.
The combined effect, in many cases is a slow suffocation
(37:05):
that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in
the lungs in essence with lethal injection, States slowly drown
the paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help.
When lethal injections have not gone according to plan, the
execution sometimes lasts hours, the agonizing deaths hidden from the
(37:25):
general public.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but
not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the
difficulty of obtaining all of the drugs from pharmaceutical firms
that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year,
twenty four states provide for some form of lethal injection,
and as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era
(37:48):
in nineteen eighty two with the execution of Charlie Brooks.
In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss
why lethal injections peaked in the nineties, how states got
around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used
in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together
to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how
(38:09):
this has all been a mixed blessing for the approximately
two one hundred prisoners on death Row. I'm Stephen Montcelly
for It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
And until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it Could Happen here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Colz Media a warning this episode includes violent content which
some listeners might find disturbing.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a
history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the
co author with longtime journalists Betsy Freeoff, of the history
of eugenics in Texas called a Purifying Knife.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
And I'm Stephen Monchelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes
covering political extremism and far right internet culture for publications
like The Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire and others.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
On December seventh, nineteen eighty two, the state of Texas
made history in a particularly grim way. It became the
first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner
to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to
make the grizzly business of executing murderers swift and humane.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions,
and by extension, the general public, that what they were
watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban
on Cruel and Unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is
based on junk science, and those who die that way,
(01:18):
may actually suffer more and over a longer time than
prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed
to hide from the public that their government is torturing
prisoners to death. As the University of Richmond law professor
Brenna Lane, the author of recently published book Secrets of
the Killing State, The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, told us.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only
does one thing, well only one, and that is it
hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence
of the death penalty, of what state killing actually is.
And I remember reading it's not in the book. I
(02:05):
kind of wish it I had put it in there,
but I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctantly.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Over the next three episodes of it could happen here,
we're going to examine the shady business of state killing.
We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and
the unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about
the untrained personnel who carry out the executions, and how
pressure from drug companies who didn't want their products associated
with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and
(02:33):
elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
We'll also talk about the pain the condemns suffer and
speak with people who have accompanied those sends to death
and their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood,
who as of this broadcast, has been the last friend
of ten men as they died by state command.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
It's incredibly strange to see someone who up to machines
that look like they're there to support life, and yet
you know that they're there to take his life.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Well, tell the story of one heroic Texas man, Rays Bouyon,
who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime,
but fought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker,
who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September eleventh
in two thousand and one and committed two Dallas area
murders in a shooting spree.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Well, definitely the execution that goes not about victims, because
the victims and the victims' family members requested and also
fault for clemency. You know why you went ahead and
requested the Governor of Texas, the Board of burdens and
earls that do not execute him in our names, you know,
show Marci, but looks like you know, we are not
(03:52):
in the same page. The system wanted to move forward,
so it was not in our names. It was basically
just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running,
sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution
is actually going to help the society, How is going
(04:12):
to help people.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Finally, will look at the future of the death penalty,
which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as
politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore
this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages
from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers
of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.
Speaker 2 (04:44):
The founders of the British colonies that became the United
States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital
punishment prevalent in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Their royal
executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them
at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them
limb from limb, sawing them in half and beheading them.
(05:07):
Such elaborate executions were meant to underscore the absolute power
of monarchs, as the political scientist Austin Sarat noted in
his book grew some spectacles, botched executions and America's death
penalty quote. Capital punishment was precisely about the right of
the state to kill as it pleased. Live, but lived
(05:27):
by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that
your life belongs to the state. However, even before the
American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less
exotic forms of capital punishment. In sixteen oh eight, authorities
in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being
a spy for the Spanish Empire. That was the first
(05:50):
execution in the British colonies in North America that later
became part of the United States. Inspired by the Old Testament.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Legal code, the thirteen British Colonies put prisoners to death
for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing food or horses,
killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, sodomy, adultery,
statutory rape, perjury, in a capital trial, insurrection, trees in manslaughter,
and of course, murder.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs. In
seventeen eighty nine, the First Congress of the United States
submitted to the States the Eighth Amendment to the United
States Constitution, which banned quote cruel and unusual punishments. The
required number of states ratified the amendments seventeen ninety one.
(06:39):
From colonial times until the first use of the electric
chair in New York in eighteen ninety, condemned prisoners in
the United States usually died at the end of a
hangman's rope. More than half the Essamey's sixteen thousand executions
in all of US history had been by hanging. Hanging
was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance,
(06:59):
skinning prisoners alive.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like
Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit
the crimes and that no one was executed for relatively
minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in seventeen ninety four, several
states such as Vermont, Maryland, and New Hampshire sharply reduced
the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty.
(07:24):
Perhaps not surprisingly, the South went in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved
African Americans they bought, sold, rape, whipped, and relentlessly forced
to work without pay. Whites reported laying sleepless at night
imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their
crimes they wanted the African Americans they so abused to
fear of the consequences of any form of resistance.
Speaker 1 (07:51):
After repeated failed rebellions from seventeen oh four to eighteen
thirty one, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw
the death of many, if not all, slave owners in Haiti,
legislators in the South greatly expanded the range of offenses
for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies
could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans,
(08:15):
who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any
experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition. In Europe, enslave
men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to
escape their captivity, faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons.
This legacy of violence in the South contributed to the
region's long term love affair with capital punishment.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
However, even hangings from it as a kindly our way
to kill became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were
trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience. In
the United States, such killings were done by local officials,
often sheriffs, who might have little or no experience at
the gallows. Executioners had to do some complicated math in
(08:59):
order to do their jobs correctly. They had to calculate
the weight of the victim and ratio to the length
of the rope, and the likely speed at which the
condemned prisoner would drop through the trapdoor at the bottom
of the gallows. If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's
neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically
killing the unfortunate victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be
(09:23):
clean and efficient, like the hanging carried out by the
US Army at the beginning of the movie The Dirty Dozen.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
What did you think of the hanging? Look very efficient?
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly,
was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove.
For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious
rituals revolved and evolved around these events, with notable exceptions.
Before the noose was placed around their necks, the condemned
(09:57):
told the sad tale of what led them to such
a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged
God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the
death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however,
often strayed from this script.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Pretty early on, the leaders of the American Republic realized
that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most
of them continued to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed
the Declaration of Independence to cry what he called the
death penalties quote brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the
earliest voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that
(10:37):
state violence made ordinary citizens more violent, and there's reason
to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that often watched
hangings and got drunk, and sometimes fights broke out as
witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows. Postcards
and mementoes were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas,
(10:58):
and fights sometimes result in injury or death. Some of
the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning
somber moral lessons, but in fact picking the pockets of
other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding on the gallows,
and executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson assaults,
another mayhem, as the public would engage in writing, not
(11:19):
unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's win
at the World Series. These unruly mobs unnerved the upper
class in Starting with Rhode Island in eighteen thirty three,
states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from
the public view. By eighteen forty five, public executions had
been banned in all of New England. This upset death
(11:40):
penalty abolitionists, who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded
during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment.
Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people
in the name of the public, and a process shrouded
in secrecy.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills.
Will be back after a few words from our sponsors.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
In eighteen ninety nine, in Samson County, North Carolina, a
local hothead named Art Kinsall's got into a heated exchange
with a neighbor, John c. Herring, at a country store.
During the fight, Kinsalls grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly
stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was
arrested for the murder, but he escaped. He was on
(12:35):
the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a
sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty,
and sentenced to die by hanging. There the story got messy.
We'll repeat what we're about to say may be upsetting
to some listeners. Kinsall's was not one to passively accept
his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take
(12:58):
his own life twice, time with sleeping pills and the
second time by cutting his own throat. These attempts delayed
the execution, but inevitably Kinsalls faced his appointment with the hangmen.
On September twenty eighth, nineteen hundred, local authorities used a
step ladder as gallows. Kinsalls did not fall from a
sufficient height to break his neck. Consequently, and the neck
(13:20):
wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so
he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose.
A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified
spectators that Kinsal's was still alive. Officers cut him down
and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time
he died. In an era in which executions took place
(13:41):
all the time, Kinsaw's gory death cut through the fog
and made national news. The Virginia Pilot called the scene revolting.
During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common.
Sometimes because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoners heads were yanked off.
Sometimes ropes ripped apart, with the prisoner falling to the ground,
(14:03):
only to be hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned
slowly strangled to death.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
John Harris, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in nineteen thirteen,
actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one
newspaper quote, prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution, According
to an estimate made in nineteen ninety three by illegal
team representing a client who was facing death by hanging.
In Washington State, between the years sixteen twenty two and
(14:32):
nineteen ninety three, authorities bungled one hundred and seventy of
about eight thousand legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering
for the prisoners in more than two percent of the
death sentences carried out by this technique.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
The growing middle class and upper class in the United
States became squeamish about hanging. As one writer put it,
bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of death itself, but
not in competence and miss management. By the early eighteen eighties,
the New York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed and
(15:06):
graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong. In eighteen eighty five,
in response in mounting public concerns, New York Governor David
Bennett Hill declared, the present mode of executing criminals by
hanging has come down to us from the dark ages.
It may well be questioned whether the science of the
present day cannot provide a means of taking the life
(15:27):
of those condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.
As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew
among elites, the New York Medico Legal Society first suggested
research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal
injection in the eighteen seventies, but a different technology arose
that delayed the advent of that protocol by more than
(15:49):
a century. Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man took
credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistance, who
toiled as menlo New Jersey lif oborratory. Edison was also
a genius of public relations, and he would come to
dominate several industries. In the early eighteen seventies, his team
had developed a feasible incandescent light bulb that ran on
(16:12):
the direct current or DC system, as Edison himself described it.
Speaker 6 (16:17):
On October twenty first, eighteen excepty what rumors, experiments resulted
in the production of a small unit map up comparatively
enormous resistance the pilipment the another conditions of great stability.
After the result, I knew the problem approached commercial solution.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
In eighteen seventy nine, Edison submitted his patent for an
electric lamp. In eighteen eighty the Edison Illuminating Company opened
for business and soon provided lights for New York and
other cities. In the early days of the electric industry,
fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In
eighteen eighty one, George Lemuel Smith, if an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer,
(17:02):
stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself
by touching a generator.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
An autopsy led some doctors to conclude that Smith died
quickly and painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to
Smith's untimely death, but suggesting that perhaps electric power could
provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid
society of convicted murderers and rapists enter a Buffalo.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Dentist Alfred Porter Southwick and doctor George Fell of the
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who both
experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current.
The early results were often horrifying, with the animals sometimes
burning live. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described
electrocution as the quote safest and kindest method of killing.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
In eighteen eighty six, New York State formed a commission
the study of prisoners could humanly be put to death.
In a similar way, the so called Jerry Commission falsely
claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments
died spuzzledly, rapidly, and efficiently. Thomas Edison would soon see
a business opportunity in state killing. At the time, Edison
(18:14):
was locked in a so called current war with another
robber barren business tycoon, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's labs had developed
a system that ran on alternating current, or AC, a
system that was more efficient, more popular, and less prone
to break down. Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions,
but the so called Wizard of Menlo Park wanted to
(18:35):
prove that the much safer Westinghouse system was in fact dangerous.
Edison had his engineer's electrocute animals using the AC current
in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system.
His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the State
of New York to hook up its first electric chair,
invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick.
(18:57):
And Edison connected that chair too an AC power system.
The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler,
who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet
during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to die
by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity for Kemler to die
in agony as the first man killed in an electric chair,
(19:20):
in order to fatally damage Westinghouse's reputation and that of
the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being
associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of
his AC generators to New York State out of fear
that they would be used to execute Kemler, but Edison
sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended
(19:41):
up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly
hired an attorney for Kemler, but the appeals failed. At
six point thirty eight in the morning August sixth, eighteen ninety,
Kemler became an unwilling pioneer.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by
keml calm demeanor, as he wished everyone in the death
chamber good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair.
The executioner pulled a switch and Kemler's body convulsed and
became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead.
Kemler started to drool, and a second jolt was ordered.
(20:18):
Kemler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose
in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described
as a quote pungent and sickening odor.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemler's agonizing death, they would have
done better with an axe. The mayhem didn't matter. In essence,
plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success
and stuck with the method for decades to come. Twenty
six other states adopted the electric chair as a method
of execution. Kemler's death would be the first of many
(20:51):
so called botched executions over the next century. As Austin
Sarat wrote in Gruesome Spectacles, eighty of the executions gone
around in the next century involved the electric chair, with
the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others resulting
in fire, smoke the smell of burning flesh. In a
prolonged period from the start to the completion.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death,
the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison
guards often caught blisters if they touched the body too soon.
In nineteen twenty three, a man named F. G. Bullen
would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the
same day. Prison officials actually placed him in a casket,
(21:35):
thinking he was dead, when a guard noticed he was
still breathing. Bullan was then carried back to the chair
and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Before the start of the twentieth century, critics knew that
both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity.
In the Lone Star State, ferinand Eugene Daniel, the editor
of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of EUJA
nnix an opponent of capital punishment. He argued that cash
straining men from families with criminal histories would be a
(22:06):
way to prevent criminals from being born in the first place.
Cash straining criminals as more Eumani said, than a hanging
or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to
a life of crime. Daniel accepted that executions would take
place for the foreseeable future, say one to make the
death penalty a vehicle for medical research instead of hanging
(22:29):
or electrocuting prisoners. Daniel suggested in a nineteen oh six
issue of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should
sedate them and, while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments.
Quote inject into him various disease germs. Watched their progress
and went through with him. Inject about ten drops of
prussic acid into the veins of his arms, and he
(22:50):
will die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Doctor Joseph Mengela
and other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little
more than three d yas d later. But as Professor
Lane explained to us, even before doctor Daniel made his
disturbing suggestion in the Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that
death by lethal injection would be a horrifying experience.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
When states turned from hanging to the electric chair. This
is back in eighteen ninety There was actually a study.
There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair,
and that report actually considered death by drugs a lethal injection.
(23:34):
And in that report they said, we considered and rejected this,
and they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Professor Lane noted that even in the nineteenth century, doctors
knew that the criminal population had a higher tendency towards
drug abuse and poor health that would make it difficult
to access a vein with a needle in order to
deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, doctors were
queasy about involvement and executions that violate the Hippocratic Oath,
(24:07):
which says, in part I will do no harm or
injustice to patients, or quote a minister a poison to
anyone when asked to do so, nor will I suggest
such a course. Professor Lane noted that a government commission
studying lethal injection late nineteenth century prophetically said that not
only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue,
(24:29):
but so with the likely refusal of doctors that take
part because of ethical concerns. This could mean that lethal
injection would be carried out biamates.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
So you know, these people have notoriously bad things. They
are elderly, they are of poor health, they are often
former drug users. You know, how did we know this
in eighteen ninety and didn't think about this in nineteen
seventy seven. Now, that was one reason. The other reason
(25:02):
was they said, we're not going to be able to
do this without the medical profession. We're not going to
be able to do it competently. And the sustained and
strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
There were other less popular alternatives to hanging in the
electric chair in the nineteen hundreds. In nineteen twenty four,
Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a
gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of straight pets and animal
shelters provided a model for human executions, and again there
were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the
(25:38):
poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The
big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of
the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the
chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in danger.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
As with the electric chair death penalty, advocates claimed that
the modern technology had provided a guilt free method for
the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther
from the truth. Doctor Richard Traitsman from John Hopkins University
School of Medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing
pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the
(26:16):
pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where
essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poisoned gas
as their preferred method of execution, but witnesses consistently reported
the condemned seemed to die acctizing struggling deaths in which
they convulsed and wretched and sometimes screamed. In nineteen sixty,
California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous
(26:45):
acclaimed books. While on death row. Before his execution, Chessman
told reporters who would witness his death that he would
nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while
he was gassed. Reporters said that Chessman indeed nodded his
head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
By the time at Chessman's death, the United States was
less than a decade from the longest pause and executions
in its history. Numerous judicial challenges the capital punishment based
on numerous racial biases police misconduct and other issues resulted
in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid
nineteen sixties. That issue was the obvious racism of the
(27:26):
death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and
who ended up the target of state killing. As Brian Stevenson,
a New York University law professor and the founder and
executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, explained in two
thousand and seven.
Speaker 7 (27:42):
In the United States, we are struggling with capital punishment
and its implementation a short quick legal history. In nineteen
seventy two, the United States Supreme Court struck down the
death penalty after recognizing that it was being applied in
an arbitrary manner. The Court in seventy two noted that
eighty seven ven percent of the people executed for the
crime of rape were black men convicted of raping white women.
(28:05):
One hundred percent of the people executed in the United
States between nineteen thirty and nineteen seventy two for the
crime of rape were executed for offenses involving victims who
were white, even though it was believed that women of
color were three times as likely to be the victims
of sexual assault.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
That racism would play a major factor in the largest
pause and executions in the history of the American death penalty.
The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund in the ACLU filed challenges
to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country,
and these legal teams won numerous stays of execution. As
(28:41):
Harvard law professor Kel Steiker observed in a YouTube video,
a de facto ban of executions had taken place by
the late nineteen sixties.
Speaker 8 (28:50):
The death penalty was in decline already in the nineteen
sixties in the United States, as it was in Europe,
but the ldf's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt,
so from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy two. In
the five years prior to the decision in Furman versus Georgia,
there weren't no executions in the United States.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Three death penalty cases, Furman versus Georgia, Jackson versus. Georgia,
and Branch versus. Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court
and were consolidated in nineteen seventy two. All three defendants
were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with
raping white women As previously noted, no white man had
ever been executed for the rape of an African American
(29:36):
woman or child in American history. In June nineteen seventy two,
the US Supreme Court issued a five to four decision
in Firman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death
penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then
practiced was unconstitutional.
Speaker 8 (29:51):
So that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or
reason to it. To use the words that they used,
it was wantonle and freakishly imposed. The immediate aftermath of
Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death,
and there were some six hundred ish people on death
(30:11):
row at the time of the Firman litigation, all had
their death penalties invalidated, so they were all sent to
the general population. They had to be re sentenced to
a sentence other than death. Moreover, when the Supreme Court
struck down the death penalty as it then existed, anyone
whose death sentence was pending that case had to be
(30:31):
dropped because those statutes were no longer valid.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
No executions took place for another four years. The Supreme
Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries
were given in capital cases were too vague. This gave
states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws.
By nineteen seventy six, thirty five states that adopted new
statues addressing the issues raised in Furman. On July second,
(30:59):
nineteen teen seventy six, in its greg versus Georgia decision,
the Supreme Court, by a seven to two margin, upheld
the death penalty. In states like Texas, where the Court
found jury instructions were clear and specific, the death penalty
were set to resume after a decade long pause. It
took a mere one hundred and ninety nine days for
(31:20):
state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer, Gary Gilmore,
by firing squad on January seventeenth, nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired in nineteen
seventy nine Pultzer Prize winning journalism based novel called The
Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of
capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless,
the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a
problem as Professor Lane writes the Oklahoma electric chair was
(31:53):
falling apart and needed to be repaired, but by the
nineteen seventies, many legislators were put off by the brutality
of that execution method and sought something more modern.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to
allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district
court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That
injunction was later overturned, but politicians across the country were
unnerved as a prospect of the public watching a man
(32:25):
essentially burn alive in their names and what that could
do to support for the death penalty.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
It was at this time that a member of the
Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for
help and designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection.
Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently like
veterinarians euthanizing animals, but doctors wanted nothing to do with
killing people. That's when Oklahoma State corner doctor J. Chapman
(32:52):
stepped in, Referring to the physicians who refused to help,
he said, quote, to hell with them, let's do this.
Professor Lane explained what happened next.
Speaker 9 (33:01):
A document in the book, legislators talking about, how, you know,
I don't know that the country's going to want to
see this sort of violence.
Speaker 3 (33:12):
All we've got is the electric chair, all we've got
is the gas chamber. People are going to be, you know,
queasy about this, and we need to find a different way.
Speaker 10 (33:21):
And unknown to many, or at least I appreciate it,
is the fact that a federal court had recognized at
the time a First Amendment right to televise executions.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Now it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that.
And so one of the things I also found was
state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't you know, we
can't have an electrocution in someone's living room, right. The
public is not going to go for this, And so
they were they were looking for a different way. They
talked about, you know what about a death by drugs?
(33:57):
And they are asking the Statement Medical Association, they're asking
their personal doctors, they're asking everybody they can find. No
one wants to play, but they get to and this
is in Oklahoma. They get to the state Medical examiner
doctor J. Chapman, and he refers to himself as an
(34:18):
expert in tet bodies, but not in how to get
them that way.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
In spite of his self confessed ignorance, Chapman made up
out of thin air the three drug protocol that would
be used in executions across the country for the next
three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but
decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be
even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in order sodium theopental,
(34:45):
which was designed to kill like a barbituate overduse, pan
coronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing,
and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or
into how they interacted with each other, and neither did
the state of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this,
Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by
every single state that had the death penalty. Laine described
her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman, who
seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this
(35:22):
execution method.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
And I later came across an interview of him where
they asked, you know, how did you come up with
the three drug protocol that every state used, every single
state for thirty five forty years, And he said, I
didn't do any research.
Speaker 11 (35:41):
I just thought about what might be useful, what you
might need. You wanted two drugs so that if one
didn't kill him, the other did. And then the interviewer said, well,
why did you add a third drug?
Speaker 3 (35:52):
And he said, why not? I didn't do any research.
Why does it matter why I chose it? He makes
it up and the state of Oklahoma adopts it basically
in an afternoon, No expert testimony, no committee hearings, no
review of the medical science, veterinary literature, nothing, and.
Speaker 10 (36:17):
It takes hold and all of the other states blindly
follow it.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he
had done any research, you would have found the components
of his three drug protocol worked at cross purposes. Anesthesiologists
believe that the amountain speed at which the sodium theapentall
is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough
for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's happening
(36:44):
to them. Meanwhile, the sodian theapent hall also slows down
blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of
the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer
a racing heart but not have a fatal heart attack.
The combined effect, in many cases is a slow suffocation
(37:05):
that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in
the lungs in essence with lethal injection, States slowly drown
the paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help.
When lethal injections have not gone according to plan, the
execution sometimes lasts hours, the agonizing deaths hidden from the
(37:25):
general public.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but
not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the
difficulty of obtaining all of the drugs from pharmaceutical firms
that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year,
twenty four states provide for some form of lethal injection,
and as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era
(37:48):
in nineteen eighty two with the execution of Charlie Brooks.
In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss
why lethal injections peaked in the nineties, how states got
around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used
in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together
to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how
(38:09):
this has all been a mixed blessing for the approximately
two one hundred prisoners on death Row. I'm Stephen Montcelly
for It Could Happen Here.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
And until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for it Could Happen here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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