A Man Who Knew About the Electric Chair

A view to the execution chamber at Sing Sing

Nobody killed more people, with more regret, than Lewis E. Lawes.

The warden of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility for 21 years, Lawes supervised the executions of 303 prisoners, all the while condemning the practice of capital punishment as barbaric, inequitable and futile.

Barely one out of 80 killers actually paid with his life, Lawes liked to note. Where was the equity in that? And, he asked, “Did you ever see a rich man go the whole route through to the Death House? I don’t know of any.”

If the prospect of execution were a deterrent to killing, Lawes asked, how did Thomas Pallister, who helped build Sing Sing’s first death house, come to be convicted of murder and ordered to die there? (He cheated the chair by breaking out and escaping; he was later found dead with a bullet to the head.)

The more Lawes learned about capital punishment, the more it puzzled him. If the point was deterrence, why choose the relatively quick end of a sudden bolt of electricity instead of something more grisly? Why not stage executions in public? If criminals feared death, why did they have to be guarded against committing suicide? Why wasn’t murder on a rampage in the 12 states that had abolished the death penalty?

In a speech on the new medium of radio in 1923, Lawes explained his practical approach. Most prisoners were eventually set free, so what happened to them behind bars was crucial.

He prescribed music and theater for prisoners, exposure to sunshine, and competitive sports, particularly football. Sing Sing’s team was, of course, the Black Sheep. Lawes brought the Yankees in for exhibition games; a homer Babe Ruth hammered over the wall and the New York Central Railroad tracks could have been his greatest swat ever, some 600 or 700 feet.

He was under no illusion that his cause to abolish capital punishment was easy, he had told the General Federation of Women’s Clubs some years before, and he urged patience. “Don’t expect to do the impossible,” he told them. “It is slow work because civilization, if it is civilization we now have, is making very slow progress.”

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Source: The New York Times, City Room Blog, Ralph Blumenthal, November 6, 2011