Word: executioner
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THE STATE of Alabama executed John Evans last Friday night. For Evans, a convicted murderer, that execution was anything but painless. Even if one can temporarily disregard the mental anguish associated with any execution, the physical pain must have been terrible. It required three 30-second blasts of electricity at...
Advocates of capital punishment now have a new responsibility to defend this or any other method of execution as humane in light of what happened in Alabama. That the state had tested the electric chair is of comparatively little importance. How does one "test" an electric chair in any case...
But a simple malfunction of machinery cannot account for the greater significance--and the greater moral dilemma--of Evans's execution. After the standard second shock of electricity, Evans was not pronounced dead, and there was an interval of several minutes during which his lawyer appealed to the Governor for...
Such a protracted execution falls under the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause of the Eighth Amendment. Aside from the legal point, however, it raises the question of humaneness more dramatically than previous incidents.
In a similar case of an unsuccessful electrocution attempt in Louisiana in 1946, the convict was returned to the chair the next year and died. It this case and the Evans case demonstrate the only two options in case of an unsuccessful execution attempt, then perhaps one could say that...