4300 Yanks Killed So Far On Electri Chair Method

[Factorial Database]

Electric Chair

By Karl S. Kruszelnicki

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Every society has ways to keep its members in line. These include silent disapproval, incarceration, expulsion, and right up to the Death Penalty. In the late 1800s, many people were against the cruelty of death by hanging - which would sometimes either slowly strangle, or surprisingly decapitate, the prisoner. Indeed, in 1834, the New York Legislature almost banned capital punishment, because of public revulsion over botched hangings. So when the electric chair was offered as a painless form of execution, many people welcomed it. But in reality, it was anything but painless.
Back in 1773, Benjamin Franklin wrote that he had successfully electrocuted a 10-pound turkey, a lamb and several chickens. But the idea for electrocuting wrong-doers came from a dentist, Alfred Southwick of Buffalo, NY, in 1881. He saw a drunk stumble onto a bare wire, and die immediately - and Southwick supposed with absolutely no evidence, that the man had died painlessly. Southwick was an engineer as well as a dentist, and served on the Commission that investigated, and then authorized, the first use of the electric chair.
The introduction of the electric chair was accompanied by a secret, and very high-level, war between the proponents of Direct Current (DC) electricity (Edison) and Alternating Current (AC) electricity (Westinghouse). The electric chairs used a thousand-or-so volts of AC to electrocute the prisoner. Edison (the DC man) secretly funded the research into AC electric chairs, so that the citizens would refuse to have Westinghouse's AC electricity in their houses. On hoarding read, "Do you want electrocutioner's current in the your children's bedroom wall?". In retaliation, Westinghouse secretly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to try to stop the electric chair execution of the axe murderer, William Kemmler. He was unsuccessful, and Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair in Auburn Prison, NY, on August 6, 1890. Edison had won the war but he lost the battle. AC became the accepted form of electricity sold in the USA, because of its technical advantages.
At its peak usage, about half of the states of the USA were using the electric chair to administer the Death Penalty. These days, the preferred method is Lethal Injection.
The main reason for the abandonment of the electric chair, is that it is so painful and barbarous that even hardened Deep South hanging judges were refusing to administer it. Kemmler's barbarous death was typical. Even though he thrashed around in agony while a thousand-plus volts of AC ran through his body, he survived. He needed a second dose of 1,300 volts for 70 seconds. The first dose had dried out some of the electrodes where they touched his skin, and so the room filled with the scent of burning flesh and hair. His blood vessels burst open, and blood squirted out of his skin. At other electric chair executions, the prisoners' leg muscles spasmed so much that they broke the leather straps holding them down, and in other cases, the flesh was cooked off the bones.
The problem lies in what the electricity does. It sends the muscles into uncontrollable, and very painful, spasms. It also sends the heart into fibrillation, where the individual heart muscles writhe in an uncoordinated fashion, like a bag of worms. But the next jolt of electricity would send the heart back into a synchronized rhythm, accompanied by massive muscle pain. And back and forth it would go, until the prisoner eventually died. The concept of an instantaneous and painless death was never realized.
Over the last century-or-so, about 4,300 prisoners were killed in the electric chair. These days, the proponents of capital punishment assure us that lethal injection is painless. You have to wonder what we'll be told in a few decades from now.

[Factorial Database]

Lethal Injection Means a Slow and Painful Death
Due to incorrect dosages
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

When lethal injection was proposed and accepted in 1977 by Oklahoma state medical examiner Jay Chapman as a human method of killing inmates, the word seemed to go out of the side of barbaric executions by hanging or electric chair. The shot is based on an anesthetic, ultrashort-acting sedative and a paralytic compound.

This cocktail should stop the heart and induce a rapid and painless death, being at the time redundant: if one chemical does not kill the inmate, one of the other two will do it.
But a new research reveals that incorrect dosage is not only painless for the executed, but it can also induce a slow death due to the asphyxiation determined by total paralysis.

The team included the molecular biologist Teresa Zimmers of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, a surgeon, an anesthesiologist and a lawyer and registered the data offered by the only two states that show records of the executions: North Carolina and California (the latter being forced by court order to do so), meaning 41 out of 891 lethal injections made in US to date.

These states employ various dosages of sodium thiopental (an anesthestetic), pancuronium bromide (a general paralyzer) and potassium chloride (this salt stops the heartbeat). They are injected in doses designed to kill condemned inmates. The dosages differ from state to state, but not from mate to mate, neglecting their body measurements (weight and height). That's why in North Carolina the executed died on average in nine minutes and in California two to eight minutes following the injection of potassium chloride.

"When potassium chloride was added, it didn't seem to change the time of death," Zimmers notes.

The levels of thiopental could have been not enough to make the procedure painless as revealed by vets, who developed accurate dosage guidelines for killing painless animals.
Sometimes, in human executions less thiopental dosage is used than for killing just 50 % of mice. Monkeys could recover in many cases from such doses.

"The way that thiopental is administered, it would be an unacceptably low dose if the inmate was a pig scheduled for euthanasia," said Zimmers.

"We are doing it successfully in animals and we're doing it successfully because they've taken a hard look at it. When you do it with animals, there is no pain. It's likely there is with people." signaled co-author Jon Sheldon, criminal defense attorney in Virginia.

Finally, the slow death is induced by the bromide, which kills by asphyxiation, as breathe muscles are paralyzed.

"In such case death by suffocation would occur in a paralyzed inmate fully aware of the progressive suffocation and potassium-induced sensation of burning," the researchers write.

"This idea that this is a painless procedure is completely wrong. It's just invisible because the person is paralyzed." said Zimmers.

[Big_Bano]

Fastest & Painless way to die is by beheading.

To be more humane, convict can be render unconscious by drinking bottles of Vodka.

That how they do it in ancient time.

Looks like it's still the best way.

[ben]

beheading sounds like the terrorist way.

[TBA]

capital punishment is barbaric and no methods are humane.

[Mr F]

Firing Squad. An eye for an eye.
No shortage of free marksmen either.