Old Sparky

The Electric Chair and the History of the Death Penalty

Anthony Galvin

• Publisher: Carrel Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781510711334
• eBook ISBN: 9781631440298
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: History

A shocking exploration of America's preferred method of capital punishment. In early 2013, Robert Gleason became the latest victim of the electric chair, a peculiarly American execution method. Shouting Póg mo thóin ("Kiss my ass" in Gaelic), he grinned as electricity shot through his system. When the current was switched off, his body slumped against the leather restraints, and Gleeson, who had strangled two fellow inmates to ensure his execution was not postponed, was dead. The execution had gone flawlessly—not a guaranteed result with the electric chair, which has gone horrifically wrong on many occasions. Old Sparky covers the history of capital punishment in America and the "current wars" between Edison and Westinghouse that led to the development of the electric chair. It examines how the electric chair became the most popular method of execution in America before being superseded by lethal injection. Famous executions are explored, alongside quirky last meals and poignant last words.The death penalty remains a hot topic of debate in America, and Old Sparky does not shy away from that controversy. Executions have gone spectacularly wrong, with convicts being set alight or needing up to five jolts of electricity before dying. There have been terrible miscarriages of justice, and the death penalty has not been applied even-handedly. Historically, African Americans, the mentally challenged, and poor defendants have been likely to get the chair, an anomaly which led the Supreme Court to briefly suspend the death penalty. Since the resumption of capital punishment in 1976, Texas alone has executed more than five hundred prisoners, and death row is full.

1

A HISTORY OF THE DEATH PENALTY

Mankind has always understood that electricity carries danger. Long before we knew what it was, we knew to avoid it. Lightning bolts come from the sky and shatter trees or bring down chimneys and the steeples of churches. The power is immense. If the lightning hits loose, wet sand it often leaves a physical mark behind. The bolt heats the sand to over 3,000 degrees, melting the silica in the sand to create glass tubes called fulgurites or thunderbolts.

These hollow tubes can be several inches across and can penetrate several feet into the ground. The largest one known to be found was over sixteen feet long, in Florida, though there are reports of fulgurites twice this length. The thunderbolts are formed in about a second. The ancient world knew all about them and knew the power of the lightning that caused them. They attributed the power to the weapons of the gods.

Now we know that electricity is the force behind the bolt of lightning and the thunderous crack that accompanies it. We have harnessed that power. It is not surprising that the idea arose to use electricity to kill people. But there is a problem; it doesn’t always kill. There are many stories of people being struck by lightning and walking away and of people being badly injured but making a full recovery. YouTube is full of dramatic footage of lightning strikes. In one a bolt spears the field during a game of soccer in South Africa and several players hit the ground as if they have been shot. But within a minute all are moving, although two had to be taken away by stretcher.

Because electricity doesn’t always kill, the electric chair has become one of the most controversial forms of execution in the modern world. A botched execution can be a slow and painful process. Today we like our executions to be clinical and efficient but that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes the point was to make the convict suffer. The history of capital punishment is littered with methods that make Old Sparky seem humane.

Most ancient and primitive societies practiced some form of the death penalty. The biblical injunction of “an eye for an eye” was almost universal and if you killed someone, you paid the ultimate price. Imprisonment, as we know it, was not common. If the crime was not serious, you paid compensation. For more serious incidents, you risked physical punishment such as being stoned in the stock, losing a hand or an eye, or having your tongue cut out. But for murder, rape, and treason, among other crimes, you would be put to death, both as a punishment and as a deterrent to others.

Methods were imaginative and gruesome. Criminals were boiled to death, flayed until all their skin peeled off, slowly sliced or disemboweled, or crushed by huge weights. In India, the weight was often supplied by an elephant slowly bringing its foot down on the criminal’s head until it smashed apart like a coconut.

The Code of Hammurabi was one of the earliest recorded legal systems. It came from Babylon around 1772 BC and contains the earliest mention of “an eye for an eye.” Law 196 states: “If a man destroys the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one breaks a man’s bone, they shall break his bone.” However, you could avoid these punishments by paying a fine.

But if you stole property or took the slave of another out of the city limits, you would be put to death. The execution method depended on the crime. If a mother and son were caught committing incest, both were burned to death. But if a scheming lover murdered his rival, he would be impaled, his body balanced on a sharp spike which would penetrate him to cause a slow and agonizing death.

The Torah, the law that governed ancient Israel, was laid out in the first five books of the Old Testament and set down the death penalty for murder, kidnapping, practicing magic, violating the Sabbath, blasphemy, and sexual crimes. Executions were rare, however.

The ancient Greeks set out their legal system about twenty-six hundred years ago, with the death penalty as punishment for a wide variety of crimes. The Romans also had a highly evolved legal system and made good use of capital punishment. One of their favorite methods was crucifixion, where the condemned were tied to a tree or a cross with their hands outstretched. As their body fell forward against the restraints, their own weight would gradually suffocate them, causing them to expire after a lengthy period.

In medieval Europe, the death penalty became one of the most common forms of punishment, particularly when applied to the lower or peasant classes. It was cheaper than detaining someone. Generally dungeons were only used to house rich captives who might be ransomed. Those convicted of crimes were put to death. The modern concept of imprisonment was unheard of. During the reign of England’s Henry VIII, seventy-two thousand people are estimated to have been executed, including two of his own wives.

Some of the medieval methods of execution were torturous. Being hanged and then drawn and quartered was one of the more barbaric. The prisoner would be hung until nearly dead and then cut down and revived. Once consciousness had returned, a sharp knife was applied to the gut and the entrails pulled out and presented to the victim. His penis was also hacked off. Finally, the executioner would chop the prisoner’s head off with an axe, bringing his suffering to a close. The body was then hacked into four quarters and put on public display as a deterrent.

Women were spared this—instead they were tied to a pole and a fire built around them. They were then burned to death. This was a common punishment for those accused of witchcraft. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries up to three hundred thousand women across Europe were subjected to this savage execution.

Times were harsher and most people accepted the rightness of capital punishment. But even then there were voices crying out against the practice. In the twelfth century, a Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides, wrote: “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death.”

It was a minority view.

2

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE USA

At present, capital punishment—the death penalty—is a legal sentence in thirty-two of the fifty states. It is also legal in the Federal justice system and in the military. While it was once a widely used sentence for rape, murder, kidnapping, burglary, and other crimes, now it is limited by the Eighth Amendment to aggravated murders committed by mentally competent adults.

The history of the death penalty in the United States is long. During the years before independence, all parts of the country, which then operated under English common law, used it. Hanging was the most popular method, but firing squads and other methods were also tried.

Capital punishment came to America with the early British colonists. The first legal executions in the colonies occurred in Virginia. In 1608 George Kendall was put to death for spying. Kendall, born in England in 1570, had settled in Jamestown, Virginia. In 1607 he was appointed a member of the first council of the colony, but a few months later was removed from the council and imprisoned, for sowing discord between the council members and plotting mutiny. Shortly after, a row broke out between the president of the council, John Ratcliffe, and a local blacksmith, James Reed. Reed was sentenced to hang, but as he stood on the gallows he confided to Ratcliffe that Kendall had been involved in a conspiracy against the council.

For divulging this information Reed was pardoned but Kendall was sentenced to death. He was held for nearly a year and in the fall of 1608 he was executed by firing squad, becoming the first victim of capital punishment in modern America.

Kendall had been convicted of spying but the first proper criminal to be executed was Daniel Frank, which again occurred in Virginia. Together with George Clark, Frank stole a calf belonging to George Yeardley, a rich landowner and future governor of Virginia. Pushed by starvation, they butchered the animal but were caught and tried. The trial took place on August 5, 1662.

The evidence showed that Frank had led the way and Clarke was just an accomplice—but that he helped bring the carcass to Frank’s house and shared in the subsequent meal. Both men were sentenced to hang. Frank was an indentured laborer—common as muck—but Clarke was a skilled gunsmith. He was valuable to the colony, so he was pardoned. But Frank was led from the courthouse and hanged from a nearby tree within minutes after the trial ended. He holds the distinction of being the first criminal to be executed in what was to become the United States.

Ten years later, Jane Champion became the first woman to be hanged in North America. Her offense is unknown. A year later, Margaret Hatch was hanged for murder. Both executions took place in Virginia.

Almost from the start, America had adopted hanging as the favored method of execution.

Worldwide, hanging is one of the most popular methods of execution. It has a number of advantages. One of these is that it involves little equipment—a high tree and a rope are often enough, though in traditional places of execution, such as Tyburn in London, a gallows was built. This was a wooden platform from which the rope could be suspended. With a big gallows, several people could be hanged at once. Hanging a convict involved far less work than drawing and quartering, burning, or even mustering a firing squad.

Another advantage is that the body could be left on display as a deterrent to others.

In extrajudicial executions such as lynchings, hanging was almost invariably used as it was so easy to arrange. The victim was placed on a horse or a cart, or even stood on a stool, and the rope placed around an overhanging branch. The stool was kicked away and the person slowly choked.

There are four common ways of hanging someone: suspension, short drop, standard drop, and long drop. Prior to the nineteenth century, only the first two methods were used. Suspension is when someone is just jerked off the ground by the noose around their neck and their own body weight strangles them against the noose. The short drop is similar in effect; the person is on a ladder or stool or similar platform, and when it is removed they drop a short distance and the noose tightens around them. Typically the noose cuts off the carotid artery, the main blood supply to the brain, and unconsciousness results within the first minute—though this is not always the case. The condemned does not struggle because of the soporific effect of the blood supply being cut off, and goes limp. It takes about ten to twenty minutes for death to occur.

This was the method of execution used in Virginia in the early days of the colony, before the United States became independent.

In modern times the standard drop and the long drop, both British innovations, have become popular. The standard drop involves a trapdoor on the gallows through which the condemned prisoner falls. The distance of the fall is normally between four and six feet and often results in the neck breaking, which speeds up death considerably as well as resulting in almost immediate unconsciousness. The long drop is a more scientific advance on the standard drop. The distance of the drop is calculated based on the height and weight of the prisoner, and the noose is placed around the neck with the knot to the front, which forces the head back as the convict drops, guaranteeing that the neck will snap.

But the drop has to be calculated precisely because too big a drop can result in decapitation, which is considered a “cruel and unusual punishment” and thus illegal under US legislation.

During colonial times, the death penalty was widely used. Britain influenced America’s use of the death penalty more than any other country. Hangings were done in public so that they would not just serve as a punishment—they were also a good moral lesson for the community. Hundreds would show up to see the victim swing. Normally a condemned person would be displayed on the gallows while a minister delivered a sermon. Then a mask was pulled over the face, a noose placed around the neck, and the platform the prisoner was standing on would drop away, plunging the condemned to his or her death.

Over the years the crimes for which hanging was considered an appropriate punishment changed. At one time, adultery was punishable by death, but this was later changed to public humiliation whereby the condemned were forced to stand on the gallows with a noose around their necks for an hour while everyone jeered at them. Then, for the rest of their lives, they would have to wear a red “A” on their clothing to alert people to their past sins. This was the Scarlet Letter made famous by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his book of the same name.

The more cruel European methods of execution rarely made their way to America. Burning at the stake was the European punishment for witchcraft. But when there was an outbreak of supposed “sorcery” in Salem, Massachusetts, those convicted were hanged rather than burned. In fact, burning was only ever used against black defendants and then only following slave revolts.

The deterrent effect of the death penalty was important. When pirates were executed, their bodies were often hung in gibbets, or body-shaped cages, by the shore or along a waterway. The flesh would rot away until all that was left was the skull and bones. In 1723 the Admiralty Court in Newport, Rhode Island, sentenced twenty-six pirates to death. When they were hanged, it was the largest nonmilitary mass execution in American history.

Death penalty laws varied from colony to colony. Some were more draconian than others. In 1612 in Virginia, Governor Sir Thomas Dale introduced the Divine, Moral and Martial Laws. This statute allowed for the execution of those convicted of stealing fruit, killing chickens, or trading with the natives. Other colonies were more lenient, but from the start executions were a feature of life on the frontier. For instance, Massachusetts Bay Colony executed a man in 1630 even though the capital laws of New England were not drawn up for years to come. The New York Colony operated under a penal code that allowed execution for striking one’s mother or father or denying the “one true God.” The Salem Witch Trials saw twenty people hanged for purely imaginary crimes.

Some of the executions from this period were horrific. During the Slave Revolts in New York in 1712, twenty-one black slaves were executed in the most brutal fashion. Twenty of them were roasted alive over a fire, dying in agony. One was broken on the wheel, a medieval torture. The slave was tied to a cart wheel and his limbs were shattered by repeated blows of a heavy hammer until he died of blood loss, trauma, and shock. The executioner was careful not to hit his head or torso, which would have sped up the death.

With the exception of the treatment of slaves, the colonies continued to be influenced by events occurring in Britain and Europe. By the middle of the eighteenth century an abolitionist movement had sprung up in Europe, backed by the writings of philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jeremy Bentham; and British Quakers like John Bellers and John Howard. Austria and Tuscany, states in what is now northern Italy, were the first to remove death penalty from their statute books. All this happened around the time the United States gained their independence from Britain.

Taking this lead, Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill to amend Virginia’s death penalty laws. He proposed that execution should be reserved for the serious crimes of murder and treason, rather than being used for minor matters like theft. He came close to succeeding, losing by just one vote.

In 1792 Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and a founder of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, began to push an abolitionist agenda. He felt strongly that public punishments were not a deterrent. At that time, it was common for those convicted of minor crimes to be locked in stocks for the day while the whole community jeered at them—and for those convicted of serious crimes to be executed in a very public manner. Rush felt this “brutalizing effect” dehumanized society, making crime more likely rather than less.

Instead he proposed imprisonment, which would allow convicts to reflect on what they had done and to allow God back into their lives. He wrote a treatise in 1792 in which he said: “The punishment of murder by death is contrary to reason, and to the order and happiness of society.”

He gained the support of Benjamin Franklin and Philadelphia Attorney General William Bradford and pushed the Pennsylvania legislature to abolish the death penalty for all but first-degree murder.

But executions were still a regular occurrence. Up to the gaining of independence, nearly 1,500 convicts had been executed. Between 1800 and 1900 the number rose sharply, to 5,381. Ten percent were in Virginia, while Texas accounted for only a tiny fraction—a trend that would dramatically turn towards the end of the twentieth century.

In 1790, the Bill of Rights was written. One of its provisions was that punishments could not be “cruel or unusual,” which made roasting slaves illegal.

The period between 1800 and 1900 accounted for some of the most savage executions that the United States has seen. One day in 1862, thirty-eight people were hanged simultaneously, the largest single execution in US history. The public executions came at the end of the Dakota Wars of that year. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A History of the Death Penalty
• 2. Capital Punishment in the USA
• 3. The Electrical Death Commission
• 4. The War of the Currents
• 5. The Development of the Electric Chair
• 6. William Kemmler, the Poor Peddler
• 7. The Spread of the Chair
• 8. A Cabinet of Curiosities—Six Notable and Unusual Executions
• 9. Last Meals
• 10. A Moratorium on Executions
• 11. Supreme Court Changes Its Mind—Executions are Back On
• 12. Back with a Bang
• 13. Top Ten—The Most Notorious Victims of Old Sparky
• 14. Refining the Death Penalty
• 15. The Rise of Lethal Injection
• 16. The Problem of Innocence
• 17. Innocence is No Defense—Herrera v. Collins
• 18. Into the Future
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Photos