Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [42]
IN THE SURVEY they sent out as part of their research, the commissioners had asked judges, district attorneys, sheriffs, and a number of physicians to comment on three methods of execution currently in use in "civilized" nations—hanging, guillotine, and garrote—and two novel ones, electricity and poison. Of those who replied, eight supported poison, five the guillotine, four the garrote. Eighty wanted to retain hanging. According to the commissioners, "eighty-seven were either decidedly in favor of electricity, or in favor of it if any change was made." This vague phrase left it unclear how many of those eighty-seven actually preferred hanging to electricity.
But Southwick and his colleagues were not holding a referendum; they were marshaling evidence to buttress their own recommendation. Although the survey revealed that hanging had many defenders, the commissioners did not seriously consider retaining the gallows. They noted that the public disapproved of hanging female prisoners, which led to obviously guilty women being acquitted by juries or pardoned by governors. The commissioners asserted (without evidence) that people objected "not so much to the execution of women as to the hanging of women," and therefore would embrace killing women by some other method. The commissioners also recounted many instances of bungled hangings, involving broken ropes, faulty trapdoors, slow strangulations, and decapitations. Considering these problems, the commissioners believed that support for the gallows was a product of blind conservatism and could therefore be discounted.25
The report revealed that there were issues at stake besides pain. Carbon monoxide, the method of choice for some SPCAs, was not considered because death from the gas, while painless, could take several minutes. Anxious to avoid a prolonged killing process, which they associated with torture, the commissioners insisted that the death be "instantaneous." They rejected the spine-crushing garrote because it was too slow and because it disfigured the body. The mutilation complaint disqualified the guillotine as well. The French—who as late as the 1780s occasionally burned criminals at the stake and broke them on the wheel—had adopted the guillotine as a humanitarian gesture. New York's death penalty commissioners conceded that the method was quick and painless, but they objected to the blood.* Considering "the fatal chop, the raw neck, the spouting blood," such executions "cannot fail to generate a love of bloodshed among those who witness them." Given that the awful details would be "presented to the public in the journals of the week," the harmful effects would spread throughout society.26
The problem was not so much the suffering of the condemned, the commissioners explained, but the bloody spectacle. Like the SPCA leaders who focused first on public cruelties, the death commissioners wanted to protect the public from the brutalizing spectacle of suffering. Their task, then, was double: to find a painless death, and an unspectacular one.
Rejecting hanging, guillotine, and garrote, the commissioners were left with two options: poison and electricity. Poison advocates recommended a hypodermic injection of prussic acid (a form of cyanide) or morphine. Critics claimed that poisons were an unreliable form of killing, because people differed in their reactions to them. Also, the hypodermic syringe was a relatively new tool in medical practice, and physicians feared that using it for executions would create a prejudice against it "among the ignorant."27
That left electricity. The commission report contained a lengthy description by Dr. George Fell of the electrical dog killings he and Southwick had conducted for the Buffalo SPCA in the summer of 1887. The commissioners quoted from electrical experts who were familiar with accidental deaths from electricity