Robert Greene Elliott On this date in 1927, Robert Greene Elliott — the “state electrician” who wired the majesty of the law to condemned men and women from Rockview, Pa. to Windsor, Vt. — had the busiest day of his illustrious career. Once just a regular prison electrician, Elliott graduated himself to the euphemism in 1926 and was soon the go-to angel of electric death throughout the northeast. He pulled the lever a reported 387 times for men and women who sat in the new killing device in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut and ( just one time ) Vermont; when John Dos Passos wrote that “they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch,” well, he could have been talking about Elliott’s $150-per-head bounty. January 6, 1927 was a full and lucrative day for Elliott. He started the day off with a triple execution in Boston’s Charleston Prison — the first triple electrocution in Massachusetts history.*...
Striving for a World without Capital Punishment