Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [76]
The growing opposition to electrical execution pleased Bourke Cockran. In June he argued Kemmler's case before S. Edwin Day, the Cayuga County judge whose courtroom was just a few blocks away from the cell where Kemmler awaited his death. Far from being a humanitarian reform, Cockran said, electrical execution constituted cruel and unusual punishment and therefore violated both the state and federal constitutions. No one had ever killed with electricity deliberately, Cockran explained, and so no one really knew what would happen to the first victim: "We hold that the state cannot experiment upon Kemmler."19
By the summer of 1889 there were so many charges of backhanded dealings and shoddy science that most people did not know what to think of electrical execution. The courts charted a deliberate course. In response to Kemmler's appeal, Judge Day ordered hearings to gather evidence on the question of whether electrical death violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments. Supporters and opponents of the law, who had sniped at each other in the press for over a year, now would meet in open debate, to be examined and cross-examined by attorneys for the state and for William Kemmler. From the crucible of the adversarial legal system, it was hoped, the pure light of truth would emerge.
CHAPTER 14
Showdown
THE HEARINGS ON the constitutionality of electrocution opened on Tuesday, July 9,1889, in Bourke Cockran's legal offices in lower Manhattan. Presiding was Tracy C. Becker, a Buffalo attorney whom Judge Day had appointed as the referee. The proceedings stretched on for more than three weeks, and among the four dozen witnesses were Thomas Edison, Elbridge Gerry, two future presidents of the American Neurological Association, and three future presidents of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
New York's daily papers gave the hearings a great deal of space in their pages, with special emphasis on the performance of Cockran. Just under six feet tall, the lawyer had a wide chest, bushy mustache, massive round head, and drooping jowls. He spoke with an Irish accent and was famous for his sharp wit and withering cross examinations. During the hearings Cockran pitched his message not only to the appellate judges but also—through the medium of the press—to the public and the state lawmakers. Although Kemmler's appeal might fail in the courts, the legislature could repeal the law if public opposition to it continued to grow. As a veteran Tammany politician, Cockran knew how to appeal to the masses, and a proper show involved something more than a parade of experts.1
Cockran called to the stand a portly man named Alfred West, who offered a tale of his own encounter with electricity. While strolling one recent summer day along the Palisades, high above the Hudson River in New Jersey, West sought shelter from a thunderstorm under a large tree. "I heard a shock which seemed to be an explosion," West testified, "and that ended my experience." The lightning bolt threw him twenty feet and blew off his pants, underclothes, socks, and shoes. When he woke up, his friends gave him some brandy and sent for medical help. The physician who came to the scene subscribed to the popular theory that a dangerous amount of electrical fluid lingered in the bodies of shock victims, rather like an overdose of a drug. He prescribed a folk remedy to "draw off the electricity: "Put his feet in warm water, and just pull on his toes the same as you milk a cow7," the doctor said.
"They done so," West explained to Cockran, "and I could feel the electricity go out of me."
"How did you feel it go out?" asked Cockran.
"The same as though you would strike your elbow and you could feel it down the fingers."
West had spent three weeks in bed after the accident, and he still bore its scars. The bolt scorched the hair off his chest and groin, and a four-inch-wide swath of burned skin ran from his chest down his right leg, then