An examination of the death penalty.
Warning: today’s edition of Tangle includes graphic descriptions of killings, sexual assault and executions. It may not be suitable for some readers.
Today’s read: 13 minutes.
Zane Michael Floyd is scheduled to be executed by the U.S. government in June. He has submitted an unusual request to the courts: death by firing squad.
Floyd is a convicted killer. If executed, he’ll become the first person to be killed by the state of Nevada in 15 years. Like most people, Floyd does not want to die. But he has a particular aversion to the idea of lethal injection. So he has requested something that — in his telling — would be a more humane solution. A bullet in the head.
The bizarre circumstances of Floyd’s case are once again thrusting the government’s right to intentionally kill its citizens into the spotlight. While 24 states still allow the death penalty, only three — Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah — still allow capital punishment by gunfire. That has made it unclear whether Floyd will get his wish, which he appears intent on pursuing in court.
But why? Why would someone choose to die in a violent, gruesome way like “death by firing squad” rather than the more painless, peaceful option of lethal injection? If that is a question you are asking, you’d be making some poor assumptions about the choices Floyd is facing.
The first recorded execution in America was in 1608. Captain George Kendall was executed for being a spy for Spain. By 1612, Virginia’s governor had enacted laws that called for executions if someone traded with Native Americans or stole grapes. Kendall, like many of the estimated 16,000 people who have been killed by a U.S. state since, was hanged.
Hanging, as you probably have seen in the movies or read about in history books, is not a particularly nice way to die. Hanging a person can go — and has gone repeatedly, throughout the history of executions — very wrong. In 1930, the first woman ever executed in Arizona was decapitated in front of a crowd of hundreds because the rope was too long. If the rope is too short, though, a hanging can slowly strangle a person rather than break their neck, which leads to a long, ugly death by suffocation.
It took a couple of hundred years for Americans to come to the conclusion that hangings were cruel, but we finally did. When we decided this form of execution was inhumane, we moved on to electrocuting prisoners instead. Thomas Edison secretly participated in the development of the first electric chair (despite publicly stating his opposition to the death penalty), and the first man to sit in it was William Kemmler, another convicted murderer.
Kemmler’s execution, like others before it, was a spectacle. It took place in 1890 and the room was full — people came from all over the state of New York to watch it. “This is the culmination of ten years’ work and study,” Alfred Southwick, who is credited as the inventor of the electric chair, proclaimed during the execution. “We live in a higher civilization today.”
Behind him, Kemmler’s “humane” execution was going horribly wrong. Electricity pulsed through his body for a full, agonizing, 17 seconds. It was clear to witnesses that he was both alive and in great pain. Some fainted, others ran out of the room, or lost their stomachs at the smell of burning flesh. “They could have done better with an ax,” George Westinghouse, a rival inventor of Edison’s who also helped develop the chair, said afterward.
That didn’t stop the electric chair’s use, though. Instead, its use was proliferated. More than 4,000 people have been killed by electrocution since, with a 3.7% “botch rate.” One prominent example of a botched execution came in 1946, when 17-year-old Willie Francis screamed “I am not dying!” as he writhed in pain inside a Louisiana prison. Francis survived, appealed to the Supreme Court on the grounds that going back to the chair would be unconstitutional, and lost his case in a 5-4 ruling. He went back to the electric chair a few months later — and this time his execution was “successful.”
As of 2021, on all of planet earth, there are only five places that still allow the government to kill someone with the electric chair: Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The last person to be killed by electric chair without the choice of an alternative was Lynda Lyon Block, who was executed on May 10, 2002.
Naturally, the gruesome nature of electric chair executions has inspired the development of alternatives. One is death by lethal gas, which has been the least common of all the “humane” alternatives to hanging or shooting people.
The first lethal gas execution was attempted in Nevada in 1924 on Gee Jon, a Chinese national and member of the Hip Sing Tong criminal society. The practitioners botched that first attempt, though, when they tried to pump the gas into Gee’s cell while he slept. Instead, the gas leaked from his cell and mostly stayed at floor level. Undeterred, they decided to create the gas chamber.
In a gas chamber execution, a prisoner is sealed inside an airtight chamber that is then pumped with hydrocyanic gas or carbon monoxide or some other asphyxiant fume, which renders the prisoner into an unconscious state where they choke to death. Sometimes, though, prisoners hold their breath, or the poisoning doesn’t go as planned, which can cause violent convulsions during the conscious suffocation of the convicted. In 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray spent eight minutes gasping for air before Mississippi wardens cleared the room of witnesses to his execution. In 1992, Donald Harding took 11 minutes to die in the gas chamber, an experience that was so traumatizing for the prison warden he vowed to quit unless the practice was permanently banned.
Naturally, after hangings, firing squads, electrocutions and the gas chamber all failed to produce satisfactory results, the grisly innovation continued. Next up was lethal injections, the most common tool for capital punishment today.