Tennessee: Death row inmate, 61, becomes second prisoner to choose to die in electric chair

A death row inmate who is scheduled to executed next week in Tennessee has requested the electric chair and not the state's preferred method of a lethal injection.

Lawyers for David Earl Miller have argued that Tennessee's midazolam-based, three-drug injection method causes excruciating pain.

In a court filing Monday, attorneys for the state said Miller had picked the electric chair, though Miller's attorneys had requested an extension of a deadline for him to make a choice.

Miller became the second death row inmate in Tennessee to request electrocution since Edmund Zagorski, who was put to death in the state's electric chair on November 1.

Miller, 61, is scheduled to die on December 6 for the 1981 slaying of 23-year-old Lee Standifer in Knoxville.

David Earl Miller was convicted of killing Lee Standifer, a young woman with a mental disability.

Her naked body was found on May 21, 1981, in the backyard of the Knoxville home where Miller had been staying, according to Tennessean archives.

Authorities said Standifer, 23, was killed by two blows to the head. She was stabbed eight times after she died.

Miller left town hitchhiking and was arrested in Columbus, Ohio, on May 29. He told authorities he dropped acid before killing Standifer. He is the longest-serving inmate on death row, where he's been since 1982.

The Tennessee Supreme Court threw out Miller's first death sentence in May 1984, ruling the original trial judge should not have let prosecutors tell the jury Miller had been arrested twice on rape charges even though he'd never been convicted.

The high court let the murder conviction stand but ordered a new sentencing hearing.

A second jury agreed with the first and condemned Miller to die in February 1987.

He is currently an inmate at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

Miller and three other death row inmates asked a federal judge to allow them to choose a firing squad as an alternative to Tennessee's execution methods — lethal injection or electric chair.

Tennessee law does not allow firing squad executions. Prisoners whose crimes occurred before 1999 have the option to choose electrocution.

Miller wrote a handwritten letter requesting that he die by electrocution and not lethal injection

Zagorski, 63, made that choice in October, stating that he thought dying in the electric chair would be quicker and less painful than a chemical injection.

He was only the second inmate put to death in the electric chair in Tennessee since 1960.

A handwritten note signed by Miller and included with Monday's court filing reads: ‘I waive lethal injection and wish to be electrocution’.

The note was dated November 23, but it was unclear if his attorney was immediately aware of it.

In court filings the next day, attorney Stephen Kissinger asked a federal judge to order the state to turn over documents related to lethal injection and electrocution so that Miller could make an informed decision about which method to choose.

Kissinger argued in court that electrocution is unconstitutional and Tennessee's lethal injection method is worse, but courts have declined to take up the case because the claims largely duplicate an earlier case in which Miller also was a plaintiff.

In that case, the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected claims that the midazolam-based lethal injection method is torture after the prisoners failed to show a more humane method was readily available.

The US Supreme Court declined to halt Zagorski's execution and take up the case. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, specifically noting Zagorski's choice to die by electrocution.

'Given what most people think of the electric chair, it's hard to imagine a more striking testament - from a person with more at stake - to the legitimate fears raised by the lethal-injection drugs that Tennessee uses', she wrote.

Zagorski's execution earlier this month seemed to take place without incident. He was convicted of the 1983 murders of two men who were shot and had their throats slit during what prosecutors say was a drug deal turned robbery.

Source: Mail Online, Leah McDonald, November, 27 2018

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