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WD_316/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0316 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
executioner's current -
In 1887, a New York State commission charged with figuring out how to electrically execute condemned prisoners wrote to Thomas A. Edison to ask the inventor's advice. Edison replied that as a lifelong progressive, he abhorred the death penalty. The commissioners wrote back to say that they understood, but since people were going to be executed anyway, could he please suggest how to do it? Edison recommended
"alternating machines," manufactured principally in this country by George Westinghouse. . . . The passage of the current from these machines through the human body, even by the slightest contacts, produces instantaneous death.
Edison, you see, sold direct current to homes and businesses; Westinghouse, the apostle of alternating current, was Edison's primary competitor.
Richard Moran's fascinating Executioner's Current tells how the electric chair was adopted in New York State. In the summer of 1890, the world's first judicial electrocution took place in Auburn, New York. A murderer named William Kemmler was strapped into the untested device and subjected to 1000 volts of alternating current for 17 seconds. Kemmler lived. The executioners had to jolt him again, with 2000 volts this time; the current began to incinerate Kemmler's body before he finally expired.
So much for Edison's "instantaneous death" theory. Yet the experiment on Kemmler turned into standard American practice for the next 75 years and more -- in fact, there were no real technological advances in electric chairs; they remained ordinary wooden seats with a few live wires attached. But they were modern. Moran notes that public hanging, the norm for executions in the U.S. before 1890, had become politically unviable. Hanging often tortured its victims. With a show of scaffold bravado, a hanged man could become a martyr, particularly within immigrant communities. Far from deterring crime, the gallows fomented social instability.
Electrocution was a way to conduct unspectacular executions in private, far from the prisoner's community. And it was a venue for a contest between rival inventors. As Westinghouse and Edison fought for control of the nation's electrical grids, they lost no opportunities to sling mud at each other. For Edison, the mud took the form of assertions that alternating current was lethal in any amount. He promoted a stooge of sorts, engineer Harold P. Brown, to conduct dubious experiments in which AC killed animals faster than DC of the same voltage. These nauseating exhibitions won Edison the skirmish: the machines that killed Kemmler were Westinghouse generators.
Westinghouse won the corporate war, however: the power that enters your home today is AC, not DC. But of course, Edison is a legend, Westinghouse a footnote. History is made by the rhetorically adept -- or the unscrupulous. But it can be written impartially and with great sensitivity, and Richard Moran does so here -- especially in his dignified, respectful treatment of Kemmler and other condemned men.
Moran, Richard. Executioner's Current: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair. New York: Knopf, 2002.
copyright © Tim Morris - 3 November 2003.
-www.uta.edu/english/tim/lection/031113.html
Electric chair -
Electric-chair is sometimes used in publications by organizations of people with disabilities to mean "electric-powered wheelchair".
The electric chair is an execution method in which the person being put to death is strapped to a chair and electrocuted through electrodes placed on the body. This execution method has been used only in the United States and for a period of several decades [1] in the Philippines (its first use there in 1924).
The electric chair has become a symbol of the death penalty. However, its use is on a decline, with Nebraska being the last state that uses it as a sole method of execution.
History:
Alfred P. Southwick developed the idea of using electric current as a method of execution after having witnessed an intoxicated man die after having touched an exposed terminal on a live generator.[1] As Southwick was a dentist accustomed to performing procedures on subjects in chairs, his electrical device appeared in the form of a chair.
The first electric chair was made by Harold P. Brown. Brown was an employee of Thomas Edison, hired for the purpose of researching electrocution and for the development of the electric chair.[citation needed] Since Brown worked for Edison, and Edison promoted Brown's work, the development of the electric chair is often erroneously credited to Edison himself. Brown's design was based on use of George Westinghouse's alternating current (AC), which was then just emerging as the rival to Edison's less transport-efficient direct current (DC), which was further along in commercial development. The decision to use AC was partly driven by Edison's claim's that AC was more lethal than DC, however at the very high currents used for the device, which could be as high as ten amperes, the difference in lethality between the two types of currents was approximately a factor of two, which was marginal. The term "electrocution" originally referred only to electrical execution (from which it is a portmanteau word), and not to accidental electrical deaths. However, since no English word was available for the latter process, with the new rise of commercial electricity, the word "electrocution" eventually took over as a description of all circumstances of electrical death.
In 1886, after a particularly gruesome and bloody hanging was reported, New York State established a committee to determine a new, more humane system of execution to replace hanging. Neither Edison nor Westinghouse as part of the War of Currents wanted their electrical system to be chosen because they feared that consumers would not want in their homes the same type of electricity used to kill criminals.
In order to prove that AC electricity was dangerous and therefore better for executions, Brown and Edison, who promoted DC electricity, publicly killed many animals with AC. They killed animals with electric current for the press in order to ensure that AC current was associated with electrical death. It was at these events that the term "electrocution" was coined. Edison tried to introduce the verb "to Westinghouse" for denoting the art of executing persons with AC current. Most of their experiments were conducted at Edison's West Orange, New Jersey, laboratory in 1888.
The demonstrations apparently had their intended effects, and the AC electric chair was adopted by the committee in 1889.[2]
When it came to building the actual state execution device, the Westinghouse company refused to sell an AC generator for the purpose, so Edison and Brown used subterfuge in order to acquire the AC generator. They pretended that the Westinghouse AC generator was for use in a university, and had it dropshipped to New York through a country in South America.
The first person to be executed via the electric chair was William Kemmler in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890; the 'state electrician' was Edwin Davis. The first 17-second passage of current though Kemmler caused unconsciousness, but failed to stop his heart and breathing. The attending physicians, Dr. Edward Charles Spitzka and Dr. Charles F. Macdonald, came forward to examine Kemmler. After confirming Kemmler was still alive, Spitzka reportedly called out, "Have the current turned on again, quick — no delay."
In the second attempt, Kemmler was shocked with 2,000 volts. Blood vessels under the skin ruptured and bled and his body caught fire.
In all, the entire execution took approximately eight minutes. Westinghouse later commented: "They would have done better using an axe." A reporter who witnessed it also said it was "an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging."
The first woman to be executed in the electric chair was Martha M. Place, executed at Sing Sing Prison on March 20, 1899. It was adopted by Ohio (1897), Massachusetts (1900), New Jersey (1906) and Virginia (1908), and soon became the prevalent method of execution in the U.S., replacing hanging (although it saw very little use in the Western states, with the gas chamber the more popular alternative to hanging there). It remained so until the mid-1980s, when lethal injection became widely accepted as an easier method for conducting judicial executions.
In 1900, Charles Justice was a prison inmate at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. While performing cleaning detail duties in the death chamber, he devised an idea to improve the efficiency of the restraints on the electric chair. Justice designed metal clamps to replace the leather straps, thus allowing for the inmate to be secured more tautly and minimize the problem of burnt flesh. These revisions were incorporated into the chair and Justice was subsequently paroled from prison. Ironically, he was convicted in a robbery/murder and returned to prison 11 years later under a death sentence. On November 9, 1911, he died in the same electric chair that he had helped to improve.[3]
A record was set on July 13, 1928 when seven men were executed, one after another, in the electric chair at Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville. In 1942, six Germans convicted of espionage in the Quirin Case were put to death in one day in the District of Columbia jail electric chair.
Notable deaths by electric chair include Leon Czolgosz, Giuseppe Zangara, Sacco and Vanzetti, Bruno Hauptman, Lepke Buchalter, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Charles Starkweather, and (post-'Furman') Ted Bundy.
After 1966 electrocutions ceased for a time in the USA, but the method continued in the Philippines [2]. A well-publicized triple execution took place in May 1972, when Jaime Jose, Basilio Pineda and Edgardo Aquino were electrocuted for the 1967 abduction, and gang-rape of the young actress Maggie dela Riva.
On May 25, 1979, John Arthur Spenkelink became the first electrocuted person after the Gregg v. Georgia decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in U.S. in 1976. He was the first person to be executed in the USA in this manner since 1966.
However, the last person to be involuntarily executed via the electric chair was Lynda Lyon Block on May 10, 2002 in Alabama.
A number of states still allow the condemned person to choose between electrocution and lethal injection. In all, seven inmates nationwide, 4 in Virginia, 2 in South Carolina and 1 in Arkansas have opted for electrocution over lethal injection. The last use of the chair (as of 2006) was on July 20, 2006, when Brandon Hedrick was electrocuted in Virginia. He elected this method. Before that, it had not been used since May 2004, when James Neil Tucker was electrocuted in South Carolina. He refused to elect his execution method.
The next execution in the chair had been scheduled for May 8, 2007 in Nebraska. However, the Nebraska Supreme Court issued a stay of execution, and thus, this execution is not likely to be carried out for at least a few months from that date. Most likely, it will not occur until a year or more, if ever. The Court cited concerns that needed to be weighed in regards to whether execution in the Nebraska chair would violate US Constitutional prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. [3] Carey Dean Moore, the condemned inmate, was convicted of the 1979 murder of two Omaha taxi drivers. Moore chose not to pursue further appeals; however, shortly after the stay granted by the Nebraska Supreme Court, he has reconsidered pursuing further challenges to his death sentence. Nebraska law provides no choice for an alternate method to electrocution.
Other countries appear to have contemplated using the method, sometimes for special reasons. Minutes of the British War Cabinet released in 2006 show that in December 1942, Winston Churchill proposed that Adolf Hitler — if caught — should be summarily executed in an electric chair, obtained from the USA. 'This man is the mainspring of evil. Instrument — electric chair, for gangsters, no doubt available on lease-lend'.[4]
References:
1. ^ (November 2000) "Alfred P. Southwick, MDS, DDS: dental practitioner, educator and originator of electrical executions". Journal of the History of Dentistry 48 (3ghy): 115-45.
2. ^ Mary Bellis (2005). Death and Money - The History of the Electric Chair. About.com. Retrieved on 13 April 2006.
3. ^ http://www.newsnet5.com/news/708555/detail.html
4. ^ War crimes and war criminals, meeting held on July 6, 1942. Retrieved on 2006-04-25.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair
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