Published in the Gainesville Times January 24, 1989, Retired Detective and Criminology Professor Alex Taylor electrifies the history of Old Sparky — the electric chair. What most people today do not realize is that this form of execution remains an option in several states, including Tennessee, which last used their electric chair on Nicholas Todd Sutton, February 2020.
Some folks are really opposed to taking shots!
A transcript and commentary follow the column.
TRANSCRIPT:
If you’ve been caught up in the hoopla of Ted Bundy’s execution, you’re certainly not alone. Throughout the greater part of American history, our application of death penalty has fascinated almost everyone.
During the past 20 years, I have taken several hundred college students on tours of Raiford Prison in Florida, and Jackson Diagnostic Center here in Georgia, where condemned prisoners are put to death.
Some of the students were asked to sit in the death chair. It was interesting how each one reacted to the experience. Some were calm and seemingly unimpressed, while others reacted with complete horror. And well they should, for the history of the electric chair is not very tidy.
We may never have had an electric chair if the State of New York, in the 1880s, had not directed a legislative committee to decide if hangings should be abolished. Contrary to popular belief, hangings are often painful, cruel and rather gruesome to observe.
During the same time the committee was in session, Thomas A. Edison and George Westinghouse were competing for domination of the new electric power industry. Edison had developed low-tension direct current (DC), and Westinghouse came out with the superior and easily installed alternating current (AC).
Faced with this competition, Edison directed one of his young engineers, Harold P. Brown, to stage shows all over the country, demonstrating his system’s death-dealing potential. Brown set about killing stray dogs, cats, and on one occasion, a large horse.
When Brown arrived in Albany, N.Y., the legislative committee on hangings asked if his system would kill an orangutan. Brown set up a demonstration and electrocuted the animal, which caught fire in the process. The commission, greatly impressed, decided that man was not covered with hair and would not catch fire.
The electric chair was born. On Aug. 6, 1890, the first execution of a human by electrocution took place at Auburn Prison in Auburn, N.Y. William Kemmler, a small-time hoodlum from Buffalo, N.Y., had been sentenced to death for the axe murder of his girlfriend, Tillie Ziegler.
When Westinghouse heard of the novel way Kemmler was to be executed, he hired one of the country’s top lawyers, Bourke Cochran, and spent more than $100,000 in an unsuccessful effort to halt the proceedings.
Finally, when Kemmler was strapped into the crude wooden chair, a first jolt of 1,000 volts was turned on for 17 seconds. After the current was turned off, shocked medical doctors watched in horror as Kemmler’s heart resumed beating. The switch was thrown again, this time for 70 long seconds until Kemmler was most certainly dead. But the electricity was too much and his body was badly burned.
A public outcry arose over the cruel and unusual method in which Kemmler was put to death. Newspapers all over the world blasted the execution as too horrible for civilized people.
One newspaper, the Buffalo Express, bannered an editorial that stated Kemmler would be the last man executed in such a manner.
Well, they were just a little wrong.
Alex Taylor’s column on history and criminology appears in The Times on Tuesdays.
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What if?
Dad told me once that his school field trips were the best part of teaching. The classroom was great for discussion — academia — but the field brought out the best and worst of his subject matter. Imagine your first observation of an autopsy, taking notes off to the side while a prostitute works an urban shopping mall, or actually sitting in that electric chair after walking past real Death Row inmates. It’s a fact that some sociology professors, especially today, don’t believe in deterrents, citing an increase in prison recidivism. I wonder how society would be if all students were shown the real, often graphic consequences of crime.
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