This New York Times piece, headlined “Afraid of Lethal Injection, Inmates Are Choosing the Electric Chair,” reviews execution trends nationwide just before Tennessee is scheduled to conduct another state killing through the use of the electric chair. Here are excerpts:
Nicholas Sutton, like other death row inmates in Tennessee, has a choice in how the state will end his life. The default, as set by state law, would be a series of injections, one to sedate him, followed by others that would paralyze him and stop his heart. Yet Mr. Sutton, like four other inmates executed before him in Tennessee since 2018, has chosen the state’s other option: Two cycles of 1,750 volts of electricity.
Nationally, the electric chair is a method of the past; no other state has used it since 2013. But inmate advocates and lawyers say the condemned men in Tennessee are choosing electrocution because they fear being frozen in place and feeling intense discomfort while drugs work to kill them.
In Ohio, a federal judge recently wrote that part of the state’s lethal injection protocol is akin to waterboarding, and botched procedures in other states have left men writhing in agony….
Tennessee joined other states more than two decades ago in turning to lethal injection as the primary method for executions, with lawmakers viewing it as a visibly calmer and less violent alternative to electrocution. But that view has been challenged in recent years, as errors and problematic executions, including one in Oklahoma in 2014 in which an inmate regained consciousness, have gained widespread notice. Many pharmaceutical companies have also made it more difficult for states to acquire the proper drugs, not wanting them associated with ending lives.
The death penalty, in general, has been on the decline in the United States, with seven states carrying out 22 executions in 2019, the second-lowest number since 1991. Last year, New Hampshire became the 21st state, and the last in New England, to abandon capital punishment….
But other states have doubled down. Last week, state officials in Oklahoma announced that lethal injection deaths would resume after a five-year hiatus and a series of botched executions….
With his execution scheduled for Thursday night, Mr. Sutton was moved on Tuesday into death watch at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, a facility in Nashville situated in a crook of the Cumberland River that houses Tennessee’s death row for men.