Electric Chair Executions Back In Tennessee As The Only Death Penalty Option

Electric chair executions are coming back to the state of Tennessee, but in this case inmates who are facing the death penalty will have no other option.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, the state of Utah is considering bringing back firing squad executions for their death penalty because it’s considerably cheaper than lethal injection and other methods. But some people also say it’s a better way to go:

“It sounds like the Wild West, but it’s probably the most humane way to kill somebody. The prisoner dies instantly. It sounds draconian. It sounds really bad, but the minute the bullet hits your heart, you’re dead. There’s no suffering. There’s no easy way to put somebody to death, but you need to be efficient and effective about it. This is certainly one way to do that.”

The electric chair legislation overwhelmingly passed both the Tennessee House (68 to 13) and Senate (23 to 3) back in April, but Republican Governor Bill Haslam only recently signed the bill into law. A Vanderbilt University poll on the death penalty found that 56 percent of voters in Tennessee support the electric chair, while 37 percent are against it.

The reason the electric chair bill came up in the first place is because states are finding it increasingly harder to obtain the right mix of drugs required for the lethal injection option from the suppliers after Europe led a boycott against drugs used to enforce the death penalty. Senator Ken Yager said it had become “a real concern that we could find ourselves in a position that if the chemicals were unavailable to us that we would not be able to carry out the sentence.”

The impetus for bringing back the electric chair was created by the recent botched execution in Oklahoma where the inmate was said to be “tortured to death.” Witnesses say the man suffered for 43 minutes after the drugs were administered, writhing and clenching his teeth in pain, but eventually died of a collapsed vein instead of the drugs.

According to Richard Dieter, the president of the Death Penalty Information Center, the difference between Tennessee and the eight other states with electric chair laws is that other states give inmates an option on whether they should be electrocuted to death:

“This is unusual and might be both cruel and unusual punishment. No state says what Tennessee says. This is forcing the inmate to use electrocution. The inmate would have an automatic Eighth Amendment challenge. The electric chair is clearly a brutal alternative.”

Dieter’s organization tracks executions and opposes all forms of the death penalty.

Tennessee currently has 74 prisoners on death row, with the most recent execution taking place in 2010. Ten other inmates have died of natural causes since 2000, while one committed suicide. The electric chair was first used in New York in 1890 and has since been used to execute hundreds of inmates.

[Image via Haunted Historian]