Quartz

The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. The state turned to the gas chamber three years later and used it for executions until 1992, when witnesses to Donald Harding’s execution described “a gruesome scene: Mr. Harding gasping, shuddering, and desperately making obscene gestures with both strapped-down hands” as he died. Arizona legislators adopted lethal injection shortly thereafter. This too proved fallible: In a botched execution last year, Joseph Wood spent almost two hours gasping in apparent distress before dying.

For the first half of American history, hanging was the predominant method of execution. Although relatively easy to set up, an improperly performed hanging could lead to death by strangulation or, as in Arizona, decapitation. The hangman’s noose was an iconic feature of frontier justice in the old American West, but its association with lynchings of African Americans after Reconstruction also transformed it into a symbol of extrajudicial terror. No state is currently considering its revival.

Electrocution marked the first attempt to make American capital punishment more palatable. New York successfully implemented the electric chair with the execution of William Kemmler in 1890. Eleven other states adopted the method by 1915, “motivated by the well-grounded belief that electrocution is less painful and more humane than hanging.” But the method was also prone to problems. In 1947, Willie Francis, a 16-year-old black juvenile found guilty of murder in Louisiana by an all-white jury, survived electrocution when the chair malfunctioned. He petitioned the Supreme Court and argued that a second attempt would violate his Fifth Amendment protections against double jeopardy and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The justices ruled 5 to 4 that it did not, and he was successfully executed in the same chair shortly thereafter.

More botched electrocutions followed over the next few decades, but the Supreme Court, which has never struck down a method of execution as unconstitutional, refused to intervene. In a particularly graphic dissent in 1985, Justice William Brennan described the physical damage that the electric chair produces at length:

Witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks."

After the Supreme Court lifted a de facto moratorium on the death penalty in 1977, lethal injection began to replace electrocution in most states, but it endured in others. Florida’s electric chair, affectionately nicknamed “Old Sparky” by prison staff, became infamous for its malfunctions. After flames erupted from Pedro Medina’s head during his 1997 execution, Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth told reporters, “People who wish to commit murder, they better not do it in the state of Florida because we may have a problem with our electric chair.”