Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [102]
In February 1890 a state assemblyman introduced a bill to rescind the gag law and allow newspapers to print full accounts of executions. Elbridge Gerry traveled to Albany to fight the new bill, arguing that printing details of executions was "an incentive to crime rather than a deterrent." Laws forbidding publication of lewd materials such as "advertisements of bawdy houses" had withstood constitutional challenge, Gerry explained, and he saw no reason why the obscenities of violence could not be restricted as well. His view carried the day, and the gag law stood.21
Kemmler's sentence stood as well. Defeated in the New York Supreme Court, the prisoner met the same fate at the state's highest appellate level, the Court of Appeals. In a unanimous decision issued March 21, the court declared the electrocution law7 constitutional. In creating the law, New York's legislature had acted "with care and caution and unusual deliberation," the justices wrote. "It would be a strange result indeed if it could now be held that its efforts to devise a more humane method" had produced precisely the opposite result.22
* Although it has been claimed that the great American furniture designer Gustav Stickley built Auburn's first electric chair, the credit belongs to the anonymous Buffalo carpenter hired by Fell. Stickley did serve as director of manufacturing operations at Auburn prison from 1892 to 1894, and he may have built the three-legged chair that replaced the original one in 1893.
CHAPTER 19
The Conversion of
William Kemmler
ON THE MORNING of March 31—a year and two days after he murdered Tillie Ziegler with a hatchet—William Kemmler put on a brown suit, a multicolored scarf, and an imitation diamond pin. Around his right wrist was a handcuff that bound him to the left wrist of Daniel McNaughton, his keeper. Joined by warden Durston, the pair boarded a train that carried them to Buffalo. The law required that Kemmler be sentenced again in the court where he was convicted, and he arrived in time for a hearing in the early afternoon. The courtroom was filled to overflowing, and spectators stood on tiptoes in the corridors, trying to catch a glimpse of the prisoner. Standing before the judge, Kemmler seemed numb and cold. Asked if he had anything to say, he replied, "No, sir."
"Then the order of the Court is that the former sentence in your case be carried into effect within the week beginning April 28," the judge said.1
There was some talk of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the previous December Bourke Cockran had vowed that if he lost in the state Court of Appeals, he would carry the case no farther. "It is generally believed that nothing further will be done," the World now reported. William Kemmler, it seemed, had less than a month to live.2
Kemmler and his escorts boarded the return train to Auburn that same day, and before midnight the prisoner was back inside his cell. He was the first occupant of that particular cell. Not long after Kemmler arrived in Auburn, the warden built two solitary cages side by side in the prison's basement to house condemned men. Since all earlier executions had taken place at county jails, this was the state's first "death row." Steel plates lined the floor, ceiling, and walls, while the front had iron bars set two inches apart. The cell was furnished with an iron bedstead, a chair, a stool, and a small stand. Just outside the door was a chair occupied at all times by one of Kemmler's two keepers, who alternated in twelve-hour shifts. Neither had worked in the prison before being hired to keep what was known as the "death watch." Kemmler slept from