As the debate rages, all executions in Florida are on hold. The United States Supreme Court, considering the appeal of another condemned killer in Florida, agreed in October, for the first time in more than a century, to consider whether the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment.

Mr. Bush contends that the chair is humane, but is considering a special session of the Legislature in January to discuss a change to lethal injection.

Opponents of the death penalty, in Florida and around the nation, have called the state's use of the chair barbarism. They have also accused Mr. Bush and other state officials who defend it of using such spectacles to deter crime and to prove they are tough on criminals.

Death penalty experts say more is at stake here than whether Florida continues to use the chair or changes to lethal injection, as other states have done. In 34 of the 38 states that have death-penalty laws, lethal injection is either the only method or a choice given to the condemned.

Once considered a humane alternative to hanging and the firing squad, electrocution is now seen by many people in Florida as the preferred way of exacting justice for a much different reason: because it poses the possibility of pain.

''A method that was once defended because it was supposed to be humane is now being mostly defended by a state because of its inhumanity,'' said Carol Steiker, a law professor and associate dean at Harvard Law School. ''It's been turned on its legal head.''

Only three other states -- Alabama, Georgia and Nebraska -- use the electric chair exclusively. Some legal experts say the Supreme Court case out of Florida could be the beginning of the end for all of them.