The Hot Squat
Say what you will about the gallows or the gas chamber, no method of state sponsored execution has a history, a mythology, or a vernacular quite as colorful and cinematic as Ol’ Sparky. Warner gangster films just wouldn’t be the same if Cagney and Robinson were facing lethal injection. There was a ritualistic, almost religious quality to the iconography of death in the electric chair—from the shaving of the leg and the sponge on the head to the loud hum and the flickering lights—you simply don’t get with more contemporary and humane methods of eliminating undesirables. And for this we can thank a dentist.
The dentist in question, Alfred P. Southwick, was a member of an 1881 NY State committee in search of a replacement for the gallows. As a dentist, he knew all about putting people in chairs before doing terrible things to them. And having read a recent news account of a drunk who’d been accidentally killed by electricity, had the idea of putting the two together, strapping people into chairs before running several thousand volts through their bodies.
The committee, finding it a grand and hilarious idea, immediately called Thomas Edison with the notion, and Edison in turn handed the job off to one of his chief engineers, Arthur Kennelly., and an employee named Harold Brown, generally known in certain circles as “That Sick Fuck.”
Brown and Kennelly worked on developing the chair over several years which, as luck would have it, coincided with the growing war between Edison and George Westinghouse over whether Edison’s DC current or Tesla’s AC current (marketed by Westinghouse) would become the dominant form of electricity for public and commercial use. Now, while there is still some question about the veracity of the story, it’s said Brown chose to use AC in his new electric chair as part of the PR battle. AC just kills better, Edison claimed, and to prove this Brown and Edison toured the country killing hundreds of animals with AC current in public demonstrations. Finally convinced of the electric chair’s entertainment value, it was adopted by the NY State legislature in 1889.
Understandably eager to try it out on something more than a sheep, William Kemmler,, convicted of murdering his common-law wife, was sentenced to be the first man to ride the lightning later that year. But then, well, as you can imagine the inevitable legal wrangling began, with lawyers claiming electrocution constituted cruel and unusual punishment. No damn lawyer was going to get in the way of this new toy, though, and an appeals judge wrote, in essence, “we can’t say it’s cruel and unusual if we haven’t tried the damn thing out yet, can we? So let’s see what happens before flapping our arms about it.” In the end the execution was simply delayed until August 6th, 1890 (55 years to the day before the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, for those keeping score). Unfortunately for everyone involved (especially Kemmler), the danged chair didn’t work too well.
Through trial and error (mostly on Kemmler) it was later determined the ideal electrocution should be a two-stage process lasting roughly a little over two minutes. The first jolt of electricity would last a minute and ten or fifteen seconds, destroying most of the major internal organs including the brain. That second jolt was more a matter of insurance than anything else, to make sure that fucker was really, really dead. In Kemmler’s case, however, the first shot of 1300 volts only lasted 17 seconds, leaving the condemned man unconscious but very much alive. Seeing the situation, and realizing the gallery was full of reporters and dignitaries (including Westinghouse), the two doctors on duty panicked and called for another jolt. Well, problem there was, see, the generator had to recharge and these things take time. Finally they were able to give him another 2000 volts, enough to burn the flesh around the electrodes and burst his blood vessels. In the end the whole ugly fracas took 8 minutes, and left one witness commenting “They should’ve used an ax.”
Still, though, ol’ Kemmler served his purpose and the electric chair soon became commonplace in death houses nationwide. For some reason, though (you think he’d have made his point by now), Edison and his various flunkies continued electrocuting animals in public for the next decade, culminating in the famed but grossly misreported electrocution of Topsy the elephant on the Coney Island boardwalk in 1903.
But even Kemmler’s sort-of botched electrocution (c’mon, give ‘em a break—it was everyone’s first time, and the guy died, didn’t he?) couldn’t hold a candle to Willie Francis.
Francis was a 16 year-old convicted of killing a Louisiana pharmacy owner in 1945. He was sentenced to death, shipped off to Angola, and in 1946 was invited to pay a visit to Gruesome Gertie—the clever nickname slapped on Louisiana’s portable electric chair. Unfortunately that particular day the guard setting up the chair for that evening’s festivities was already a little soused and neglected to make all the proper connections. As a result Willie got a mighty shock all right, but not enough to render him unconscious, let alone kill him. Witnesses in the gallery reported hearing the boy scream two things through his leather hood: “I’m not dying,” and “stop it, let me breathe.” Once the applause died down, prison officials eventually gave up and turned off the juice, leaving Willie alive and, hooboy, very much awake. Shortly afterwards, Willie was quoted as saying “My mouth tasted like cold peanut butter.”
Cryptic as that was, state officials immediately began making plans for a second execution attempt. And sure enough, those pesky lawyers got involved again, claiming electrocuting the teen a second time really would amount to cruel and unusual punishment. Well, that whole foofarilla went all the way to the Supreme Court, who in their final decision ruled that not only would it not be cruel and unusual—it’d be kind of a hoot. So on May 9th, 1947,Willie Francis made it into the history books by becoming the first man sent to the electric chair a second time.
There, ah, yeah, there didn’t need to be a third try.
by Jim Knipfel