Nationally, electrocution is outdated. But four of the past five condemned men put to death in Tennessee have chosen it over injection. A fifth is scheduled for execution this week.
NASHVILLE — Nicholas Sutton, like other death row inmates in Tennessee, has a choice in how the state will end his life.
The default, as set by state law, would be a series of injections, one to sedate him, followed by others that would paralyze him and stop his heart. Yet Mr. Sutton, like four other inmates executed before him in Tennessee since 2018, has chosen the state’s other option: Two cycles of 1,750 volts of electricity.
Nationally, the electric chair is a method of the past; no other state has used it since 2013. But inmate advocates and lawyers say the condemned men in Tennessee are choosing electrocution because they fear being frozen in place and feeling intense discomfort while drugs work to kill them.
In Ohio, a federal judge recently wrote that part of the state’s lethal injection protocol is akin to waterboarding, and botched procedures in other states have left men writhing in agony.
“When everything works perfectly, it’s about 14 minutes of pain and horror,” said Stephen Kissinger, an assistant federal community defender who has represented Mr. Sutton and other death row inmates. “Then, they look at electrocution, and how long does it take?”
Tennessee joined other states more than two decades ago in turning to lethal injection as the primary method for executions, with lawmakers viewing it as a visibly calmer and less violent alternative to electrocution.
But that view has been challenged in recent years, as errors and problematic executions, including one in Oklahoma in 2014 in which an inmate regained consciousness, have gained widespread notice. Many pharmaceutical companies have also made it more difficult for states to acquire the proper drugs, not wanting them associated with ending lives.
The death penalty, in general, has been on the decline in the United States, with seven states carrying out 22 executions in 2019, the second-lowest number since 1991. Last year, New Hampshire became the 21st state, and the last in New England, to abandon capital punishment. And a year ago, Ohio paused executions while state officials considered a new lethal injection protocol after the drugs could not be obtained and a federal judge found that the method could cause an inmate “severe pain and needless suffering.”
“Ohio is not going to execute someone under my watch when a federal judge has found it to be cruel and unusual punishment,” Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said last year.
But other states have doubled down. Last week, state officials in Oklahoma announced that lethal injection deaths would resume after a five-year hiatus and a series of botched executions.
In Tennessee, the protocol calls for the injection of three drugs: midazolam, a sedative; vecuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. Dorinda L. Carter, a spokeswoman for the State Department of Correction, noted that “lethal injection has repeatedly been upheld as constitutional in Tennessee.”
The state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, has also maintained his support of the death penalty, saying in an interview with The Associated Press published in December that he believes the punishment remains “appropriate for those most heinous of crimes.”
Some medical experts contend that lethal injection tests the constitutional limits on cruel punishment. Joel B. Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University, said the sedative used in the three-drug cocktail does not inure the inmates to pain and that the paralytic masks the torment they are enduring.
“You just don’t see much,” Dr. Zivot said. “You see a person lying there.” He added that it creates an impression that the inmates are simply “falling asleep and dying.” Instead, he said, the drugs can cause their lungs to fill with fluid, asphyxiating them, and makes them feel like they are burning.
Dr. Zivot, who has evaluated Mr. Sutton, along with other inmates on Tennessee’s death row, said the inmates are often in poor health, with a litany of medical problems, including diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and pulmonary ailments.
“With respect to the rightness or wrongness, I’m agnostic,” Dr. Zivot said of capital punishment. But, he added, “You may say, who cares? It’s just an inmate who has killed someone, and we owe them nothing. Some people may think that, but the constitution says otherwise.”
Nearly four decades had passed without an inmate being put to death in Tennessee when state lawmakers, in 1998, added lethal injection as a method of execution. Two years later, it became the state’s primary method. But according to state law, inmates who were condemned to death before 1999 are allowed to choose between lethal injection and electrocution.
Of the 52 inmates on Tennessee’s death row, more than half received their sentences before the cutoff, according to data from the state’s Department of Correction.
In 2007, Daryl Keith Holton, who confessed to killing four children, including three of his own, was the first inmate to be executed by electrocution in the state since 1960. Since 2018, four inmates have been put to death by the electric chair.
The most recent was Lee Hall, who was executed in December for killing his former girlfriend, Traci Crozier, by dousing her in gasoline and setting her on fire. A helmet with a sponge soaked in saline solution was put on his head, and a dark shroud was attached to it.
“I think people can learn forgiveness and love and make the world a better place,” Mr. Hall, 53, said before being struck by a burst of electricity, which caused steam or smoke to emanate from his head, witnesses told the news media.
Afterward, Stacie Wooten, the victim’s sister, said Mr. Hall’s death had brought a measure of consolation. “Our family’s peace can begin, but another family’s hell has to begin,” she told reporters, according to The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.
Mr. Sutton, 58, was sentenced to death for his involvement in the killing of Carl Estep, another inmate in the prison where Mr. Sutton, who was 23 at the time, was incarcerated. He had been convicted of first-degree murder for knocking unconscious his grandmother, who had raised him, and throwing her into a river. He received two other life sentences after he confessed to killing a pair of men, John Large and Charles Almon.
In an appeal for clemency, Mr. Sutton’s lawyers depicted his transformation over more than 35 years in prison. The mother of a fellow inmate who had untreated multiple sclerosis said Mr. Sutton had comforted her son and even carried him, they said. Corrections officers also said they “owed their lives” to him for rescuing them from being attacked by other inmates.
“He placed my safety and well-being above his own,” one corrections official, Tony Eden, wrote in an op-ed published in The Tennessean, where he also called Mr. Sutton the “most rehabilitated inmate I have ever known.”
“Simply put,” he added, “the prison will be safer with Sutton serving life than it would be if he is executed.”
Mr. Sutton also sought to put off his execution by arguing, among other things, that he had been improperly shackled in front of jurors while on trial. But the Tennessee Supreme Court rejected his claims, saying in a ruling last Friday that “Mr. Sutton has failed to prove a likelihood of success on the merits of the litigation in both matters.”
With his execution scheduled for Thursday night, Mr. Sutton was moved on Tuesday into death watch at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, a facility in Nashville situated in a crook of the Cumberland River that houses Tennessee’s death row for men.
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He was placed under 24-hour observation in a cell adjoining the execution chamber, allowed to have his toiletries, 12 sheets of stationery, three stamped envelopes and a pencil that he must return to a correctional officer whenever he isn’t using it. There, he awaited the governor’s decision on whether to carry out his execution, which came Wednesday.
“After careful consideration of Nicholas Sutton’s request for clemency and a thorough review of the case,” Mr. Lee said in a statement, “I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and will not be intervening.”
Source: nytimes.com, Rick Rojas, February 19, 2020
5 Things to know about Tennessee electric chair
This story was initially published by the Associated Press in 2014. It was updated in December 2019.
Tennessee is ready to execute its fifth death row inmate in the last two years, and third by electric chair. Stephen Michael West is scheduled to be electrocuted to death on Thursday, Aug. 15.
David Earl Miller was executed on December 6, 2018.
A month earlier, Edmund Zagorski became the first death row inmate to die by the electric chair since 2007.
Their requests come on the heels of a law that took effect in July 2018 making Tennessee the first U.S. state to have the option of executing death row inmates with the electric chair if drugs for lethal injections are not available.
Here are five things to know about the state's electric chair, provided by The Associated Press:
Most recent electrocutions
Zagorski was executed by the electric chair at 7:26 p.m. CDT on Thursday, Nov. 1.
Prior to Zagorski, the last person to be electrocuted in Tennessee was convicted child killer Daryl Holton, who in 2007 chose to die via the electric chair. The state's medical examiner later found that Holton suffered minor burns on his head and legs, but had no signs of severe burning, disfigurement or other major injuries that had occurred in some other electrocutions around the country. Under previous law, death row inmates convicted before lethal injection was introduced in 1999 could choose to die by electrocution.
The return of 'Old Sparky'
Tennessee is one of several states to nickname its electric chair "Old Sparky." The chair was built out of the gallows used by the state before it abolished hangings in 1913. A replacement chair was built in 1989, but it kept the old wooden back legs. The original chair that was retired after 125 electrocutions, and the new chair is stored in the state's execution chamber in Nashville alongside the lethal injection equipment.
Chair revisions
Fred Leuchter, the Massachusetts man who rebuilt Tennessee's electric chair in 1989, has taken issue with subsequent decreases in the voltage and duration of the jolts, arguing that they make it more likely for the inmate to feel pain and to "cook the executee and boil his blood." But Leuchter said his concerns have been ignored because of statements he's made in the past claiming historians have inflated the number of Holocaust victims during World War II.
How the chair is prepared and tested
Correction Commissioner Derrick Schofield has expressed confidence that procedures and testing on the electric chair have been sufficient to put it back into regular use. Records obtained by The Associated Press show that an electrician — whose identity is redacted under state law — tests the chair to confirm it will execute an inmate. The testing is meant to confirm the chair will deliver 1,750 volts at 7 amps over 20 seconds, disengage for 15 seconds and then re-engage for another 15 seconds. Execution team members train to use the electric chair monthly and public records show it was tested by prison officials in February.
Previous problems
Tennessee's death penalty procedures came under scrutiny in 2007 when its 100-page "Manual of Execution" turned out to be a jumble of conflicting instructions that mixed up guidelines for lethal injections and the electric chair. For example, the document instructed executioners to shave a prisoner's head before a lethal injection and to have a fire extinguisher nearby. Executions were put on hold while the state rewrote the manual.
About the execution photo: Allen Lee Davis (July 20, 1944 – July 8, 1999) was an American mass murderer executed for the May 11, 1982, murder of Nancy Weiler, who was three months pregnant, in Jacksonville, Florida. According to reports, Nancy Weiler was "beaten almost beyond recognition" by Davis with a .357 Magnum, and hit more than 25 times in the face and head. He was also convicted of killing Nancy Weiler's two daughters, Kristina, age 10, who was shot twice in the face, and Katherine, age 5, who was shot as she tried to run away and then had her skull beaten in with the gun. Davis was on parole for armed robbery at the time of the murders. He was executed on July 8, 1999. Davis's execution drew nationwide media attention after he bled profusely from the nose while being electrocuted. Also during his time in the electric chair, Davis suffered burns to his head, leg, and groin area. A subsequent investigation concluded that Davis had begun bleeding before the first jolt of electricity was applied. He had been taking blood thinning medication for an unrelated health problem. It was concluded that the electric chair had functioned as designed and the Florida Supreme Court upheld electrocution as a means of capital punishment. However, a dissenting justice published photos of the aftermath of the incident in an attempt to argue that the practice of capital punishment by electrocution was outdated, and that any future executions should be carried out through lethal injection (Wikipedia).
Source: The Tennessean, Staff, Dec. 15, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde