What Really Happens During an Execution

Executions have been a part of human culture for centuries, from hangings to lethal injections, but what actually happens during an execution depends upon the execution method. Check out today’s insane new video that chronicles the different types of execution styles in human history.

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A man hangs upside down on a gurney in what is described as an “inverted crucifixion position.” He’s in “agonizing pain and distress” as he’s subjected to “ever-escalating levels of…torture.” His pleas for them to stop are ignored as he’s stabbed in the chest repeatedly. Is this verbatim description of torture from Middle Ages England? Is it taken from the texts of Ming Dynasty China in the 15th century, or perhaps it’s a snippet from the diary of Dean Corll, the ultra-sadistic American serial killer known as the Candy Man? Actually, it happened on November 17, 2022, in the USA. The ordeal was later described as a “gruesome scene in the death chamber.” So gruesome, in fact, that the state that did it and other US states have discussed switching to alternative methods of execution. They’re under pressure, being called barbaric by the rest of the highly developed world and taking similar flak from anti-death penalty Americans. It’s why some death penalty states have mulled over using a new and, it has to be said, novel type of execution, something never tested in the US that sounds like it could be written into a horror movie. We’ll come back to this new method of killing criminals soon. First, we need to talk about the death penalty in general. Eye-for-an-eye punishments go back to early human history. Such actions were written in the ancient Babylonian legal text Hammurabi’s Code, the first legal code written between 1755 and 1750 BC. The text included revolutionary reforms such as minimum wages being written into this law but also a law that stated that if a boy strikes his pop with his hand, that hand should be “hewn off.” Worse, if cheating lovers were caught planning to kill their spouses, the law dictated that they should both be impaled. You’ve probably heard that the Romans get an A+ for creativity regarding their state-sponsored executions, sometimes throwing men to the lions or perhaps having elephants sit on them in an arena packed with a cheering crowd. This type of execution was what was called “damnatio ad bestias.” The Romans had many more tricks up their long sleeves. What was known as “Poena Cullei” was a particularly confounding method of execution, when the authorities put men in a leather sack along with frantic animals, such as a cock, a snake, a monkey, or a cat or dog, and then threw the chaotic bundle into the sea. We humans have moved on since those dark days. Still, after the Romans, we had all kinds of wicked forms of capital punishment, from throwing from cliffs to flaying a person’s skin to boiling folks to death in a large pot. Then there were the disputed methods of capital punishment, such as rat torture and the infamous Viking Blood Eagle, when a man’s lungs were pulled through his backbone and placed over his ribs to make a pair of wings. It’s not disputed that in China, the authorities not only slowly sliced or flayed a person, sometimes thousands of people in a matter of days, but they murdered their innocent family members in what was called nine familial exterminations. The kill list included parents, grandparents, children, uncles, aunts, cousins, spouses, and in-laws. Some of the more common methods of execution throughout European history include beheading, breaking on wheel, burning at the stake, and drawing and quartering treasonous males after the subjects had been emasculated and disemboweled. Human culture evolved. We scrutinized the morality of our actions, but for a long time, executions were often a matter of spectacle for the public, those hard-to-please mobs that didn’t have movies to satiate their blood lust. The last person to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in Europe was a Scottish man named David Tyrie, a clerk at a Portsmouth naval office who was accused of spying for the French. A crowd of 100,000 people attended the event at Southsea Beach in Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. The date was 1782, when Europe was well into the Enlightenment period. Writing about the execution, The Hampshire Chronicle stated: “He declined saying a word to the populace, observing that he knew not why he was to feed or gratify the idle curiosity of the multitude… His head was severed from his body, his heart taken out and burnt, his privities cut off, and his body quartered. He was then put into a coffin and buried among the pebbles by the sea-side.” Executions were often like frenzied public information films. The message in the narrative was clear: This is what you get when you mess with us. Public executions in Europe would draw so many spectators that people came from far and wide to set up a stall and sell their wares. The German executioner, Franz Schmidt, who hanged, beheaded, and broke on the wheel 361 people in his 45-year career starting in 1571, wrote that mobs in Germany would even kill the executioner if they weren’t happy with his work. The mob, he said, didn’t like a botch job. As you’ll see in this show, that’s also true in today’s world. China was still slow-slicing people in the early 20th century, by which time the Europeans were calling such acts barbaric. These days in Europe, only Russia and Belarus still have the death penalty on the books, although Russia hasn’t executed a person since 1996. The condemned man was the utterly sadistic serial killer of children, Sergei Golovkin. Maybe Russia felt he was a special case; after all, this maniac took kids into his dungeon and brutally tortured them. As for Belarus, human rights organizations say it’s hard to know how many people are executed there since the government does not always report the numbers. Records we do have show 278 executions from 1992 to 2010, with the last one being in 2022. The condemned man was Viktar Skrundzik, a killer of elderly folks. He was shot by firing squad, something we’ll also discuss later in this show, but in relation to the US. 54 countries in the world retain the death penalty today. 112 nations have abolished it. Some have it as a law but haven’t applied it for at least ten years. Then you have countries such as China and North Korea, which don’t report how many people they execute. China, according to Amnesty International, leads the way in the number of citizens it executes – more than 1,000 a year. You also have countries that often indulge in extrajudicial killings. They don’t even bother with adherence to the law. In Thailand, for instance, it was reported in the early 2000s that police in the province of Kalasin tortured and murdered kids during the then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s War on Drugs. It’s thought 2,000 people were murdered off the books during this chaotic period. It’s reported that when former Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte tried something similar, 7,742 civilians were murdered from 2016 and 2021. Extrajudicial murders by the authorities are no doubt still happening in many countries in the world today. We can’t ignore them when talking about the death penalty, but of the formal death penalty, where numbers are reported, if we leave out China and North Korea, the leaders for executions in 2022 were Iran (596 executions), Saudi Arabia (146), Egypt (24) and Somalia (6-19). Those countries’ methods could range from hanging, beheading (Saudi), or firing squad. The US was next on the list, with 18 executions in 2022. The US is the last remaining Western nation classified as an advanced economy to actively execute its citizens. Non-western nations that meet this classification criteria and still actively execute people are Singapore (11 in 2022), Japan (1), and Taiwan (last execution in 2020). In the US, the country we’ll concentrate on today, there are still numerous methods of execution on the books. One of them is being killed by a firing squad. You can still be shot down by law in Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, and South Carolina. Ronnie Lee Gardner, a man who shot and killed an attorney during a prison escape in 1985, was the last person to be executed by firing squad in the US. That was in 2010. Since 1976, only three men have been executed this way in the US, despite it being one of the more successful forms of execution in regard to mistakes being made and the condemned person’s suffering. When it was Gardener’s turn, five anonymous law enforcement officers volunteered for the job. On the day, they stood about 20 feet away from Gardener. The media explained that the officers were hidden in darkness, while Gardener, according to the BBC, was “bathed in light.” The same report explained, “A target was placed over his heart and a hood over his head before the five men opened fire.” As is usually the case these days, the officers were asked to hit the man in the chest. Aim for the heart is how this kind of execution goes down. It’s quite a large area, often with a target over it, such as a piece of cloth. They don’t go for the head, mainly because that would be messy. It also wouldn’t look too good if there were an open-casket funeral. In Gardener’s case, like in other firing squad executions, none of the officers knew for sure if they had killed him. One of the guns was loaded with a dummy bullet, something that caused the same recoil on the rifle as a real bullet. This meant all the officers could feel better about their actions, knowing they might not have killed the man. Still, shooting a criminal to death is largely frowned upon by the American public and not something many government employees want to take part in. Believe it or not, you can still be hanged in the US. The practice is seen as barbaric by many Americans, but hanging is still written into law in New Hampshire, just one of the 27 US states to have it. New Hampshire abolished the death penalty, but appeals might apply retroactively, meaning a prison on death row could still be executed. It’s very, very doubtful anyone would be hanged again ever in the US. It won’t happen, but we thought we’d let you know how it used to go down. By the way, Texas wins hands down for the most executions, with 583 people officially taken out there since 1976. In 2023 so far, what might become a bumper year, there have been five executions in Texas, four in Missouri, and three in Oklahoma. Florida is actually top with six so far this year, at least when we started making this show in late October. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, at least another ten executions were planned after we began writing this show, although whether they go through is another matter. They are all male, which is hardly surprising. Since 1976, when the US Supreme Court lifted the moratorium on capital punishment, only 18 women have been executed. Of the 1,578 executions in total since 1976, only 1.5% were women. Ok, back to hanging, a method of execution that throughout history has seen men and women losing their heads and hanging around in agonizing pain, not to mention a few beat-up survivors. On January 26, 1996, Billy Bailey became the last hanging execution in the US. Baily, who grew up in abject poverty, one of 23 children his parents had, was a very troubled boy. In 1979, after a robbery, he murdered two old folks in cold blood. After being sentenced to death, he told a visitor, “I’m not a dog. I’m not gonna let them put me to sleep.” Delaware had not hanged anyone for half a century, but the state allowed Bailey to opt for it. This is how it went down. The wooden gallows were in no state from which to hang him. As Warden Robert Snyder pointed out, “Our gallows is pretty primitive here.” On top of that, officials in Delaware were not really savvy as to how such an operation could be successfully administered. They sought advice from corrections officials at Washington State Penitentiary, who’d hanged two killers separately in 1993 and 1994. Officials had the gallows renovated, ensuring the structure, which was 15 feet high and 23 steps up, was stable. The protocol demanded they use 30 feet of 3/4 inch diameter Manila hemp rope, which was boiled to stop it from stretching or coiling. The part of the rope at the knot was greased with paraffin oil to ensure easy movement. They practiced with a sandbag before the event, doing the math to successfully kill Bailey without causing him any unnecessary pain. He weighed 220 pounds (100 kg). It was decided that a drop of around 5 feet (1.5 meters) would do the trick. Drop lengths throughout history have been a matter of research. Too little and the person’s neck might not break; too much and his head might come off and roll on the ground. Not a pleasant sight for spectators. When this happened to the black widow killer Eva Dugan in Arizona in 1930, the first and last woman executed by that state, it was a grim scene. Her head rolled to the feet of the spectators while her heart kept pumping blood. Blood oozed from her severed neck for a matter of minutes. Two male and three female witnesses fainted at such a macabre sight, and after that, Arizona said no more hangings; let’s change to the gas chamber. As you’ll see later in this show, this has had dire consequences. On the day of Billy Bailey’s execution, he was taken from his cell to a trailer close to the gallows. His last 24 hours were spent watching TV, eating, and talking with prison staff. He had words with the chaplain and his attorney, and as is protocol in most but not all US states, he was offered the choice of a bespoke last meal. He ordered a steak, well-done, buttered rolls, baked potato with sour cream and butter, peas, and vanilla ice cream. As is also often the case, Bailey was taken to the gallows not long before midnight. Prison officers walked with him, some with dogs at their side. Bailey stood before the apparatus as his glasses were removed. The top two buttons of his prison-issue blue denim coat were fastened to stop his coat from blowing in the wind. They then tied his hands at his side. All this time, the phone line was open. This is why prisoners are often executed around midnight. Who knows if a call might come through and get the condemned a last-minute stay of execution? As you’ll see later, this does happen occasionally. Bailey didn’t get the call. Two men wearing black jumpsuits, and black hoods fastened down with baseball caps, took Bailey up the steps where a six-coil noose was blowing in the wind. As he got to the platform, about 40 people were in attendance. These days, such an event is a very somber and quiet affair, unlike the media circus surrounding the last public execution in the US of Rainey Bethea in August 1936, watched by a crowd of 20,000. Baily showed no emotion whatsoever. One officer held his shoulder, another his arm, while the hangman, Warden Snyder, led Bailey toward the trap door. A cord was tied around his ankles, and a black hood was placed over his head and upper chest. The noose was then placed over his head. Warden Snyder made sure that the knot was in the right position, just under Bailey’s left ear. Snyder then said, “Do you have any last words?” Bailey replied, “Pardon?” Snyder asked him again if he had any last words. “No sir,” said Bailey. It sounded as though Bailey was calm. He emitted no heavy breathing or signs of distress. He barely moved, although witnesses saw his right hand form into a fist. A second later, at 12.04 a.m., Snyder pulled a gray lever with both his hands, which gave way to a loud crunch and the opening of the trapdoor. Bailey and the rope fell through the hole, landing with a jerking motion about 10 feet from the ground. A witness said it looked like a doll on that rope, which turned counter-clockwise six times, then stopped accelerating and span in the other direction. The process is designed to cause immediate paralysis and unconsciousness. The upper cervical spine is snapped in what’s known as the “hangman’s fracture.” The cause of death will be asphyxiation. Since there is still blood containing oxygen in the brain, the brain continues to function for a while, but who knows if there are thoughts or dreams in there. Spectators didn’t see much more. As Bailey hanged there, no longer spinning, officials wrapped a canvas tarpaulin around his body. All the spectators could now see were his white tennis shoes, dangling like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. At 12.15 am., 11 minutes after the drop, Mr. Bailey was pronounced dead. A spokeswoman for the Correction Department told reporters that the execution had gone through “without complication.” Some Americans said it was a job well done, while others decried the barbarity of the system. The victims’ great-grandson, Chris Lambertson, waiting outside the prison, was glad. Reporters asked him how he felt about what had just happened. He replied, “I’m out here to see that justice is served. Just because Billy Bailey wanted their truck, he killed my great-grandparents. Without a doubt, he should die.” Close by were around 150 noisy demonstrators, some of them for the death penalty and some of them against the death penalty. There may well have been an equal mix of both. According to recent Gallup polls, about 54% of Americans feel the death penalty is needed despite the risks of getting the wrong person. About 190 people have been exonerated from death row in US history. Researchers have said that around 4% of death row prisoners are likely innocent. We’ll ask you a question here, which we hope you’ll answer after seeing the rest of the show. Much has been said about the best way to execute someone. Humans have gone from slow-slicing, from throwing a man to starving bears or ripping him up while still alive, to giving prisoners counseling, pizza, and apple pie before they die. Every precaution is usually made so they don’t suffer more than is necessary. This is widely acknowledged as an improvement, but you’ll see soon how executions can be prolonged, agonizing affairs for the prisoner. While these often extremely violent men don’t usually merit much sympathy, Americans have asked if other forms of execution that always work and never last long should be implemented. Some have discussed a form of execution that never failed, that was always painless, that was incredibly quick. They mean that French invention, the guillotine. This beheading machine in the world of execution was frankly untouchable. Nonetheless, it is deemed barbaric, while lethal injection is considered much more civilized. Bear this in mind as we carry on with the show. First, let’s talk about electrocution, which, believe it or not, is still a thing in eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Death by the electric chair has always been controversial in the US because there have been some horrifically botched executions. The ugly execution scene in an electric chair from The Green Mile was based on reality. In 1997, lady killer Pedro Medina had his date with “Old Sparky” in Florida. The New York Times wrote, “Thousands of volts of electricity coursed through the murderer’s body, flames burst from his face mask, startling the assembled witnesses.” Experts later said that Medina would have been braindead at the time, but still, no one knew that for sure. His execution reminded people of the case of young Willie Francis, who was sentenced to death in Louisiana in 1945 when he was just 16. He may well have been innocent of the crime of killing a pharmacy owner. Some people believe cops coerced him into confessing, and it’s widely known his court-appointed defense attorneys offered very little support to him at a time of pervasive racism when Francis faced the prospect of twelve white jurors. The possibility of his innocence makes his botched execution that much more disturbing. When he was placed in a chair nicknamed “Gruesome Gertie” about a year after the crime, and the voltage was turned up, he screamed from under his hood, “Take it off! Take it off! Let me breathe!” It turned out the drunken guards at Louisiana State Penitentiary had not set up the apparatus correctly. Francis was executed a year later, aged 18. Then there was Jesse Tafero, convicted of killing two cops in 1976. This man was a nasty piece of work, a human without morals, but his botched execution in 1990 was still regarded as a human rights catastrophe. We’ll let a witness to that execution describe in his own words what he saw: “When the electricity hit Jesse Tafero, the headset bolted onto his bare scalp caught fire. Flames blazed from his head, arcing bright orange with tails of dark smoke. A gigantic buzzing sound filled the chamber, so deep I felt it inside the bones of my spine… his fists… slammed upward and back. ‘He is breathing’, I wrote on my yellow notepad.” The executioner, hidden in a room nearby, turned off the machine. Tafero was breathing, his chest heaving. His head nodded back and forth. Then the executioner gave him another blast of electricity, flames and smoke still surrounding his head. Yet again, once the volts were turned off, Tafero’s chest was heaving. His head was still moving. He died after the third shock. It turned out that the chair, Old Sparky, had been in need of a new sponge for the headpiece, and someone, someone without the correct training, had assumed any old sponge would do. So, a new one was picked up, the kind of synthetic sponge you can find in any dollar store, while what was required was a genuine sea sponge since they can handle the electric current without bursting into flames. Well, it’s assumed they can. We’ll show you in a second it’s not always the case. In the 2014 book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, it’s written that of the 9,000 executions in the US from 1890 to 2010, three percent, 276, were botched. This included the first-ever execution with the electric chair. The condemned man was William Kemmler, a booze-addled peddler and killer from the tough slums of Buffalo, New York. It was decided that with so many botched hangings, the chair was the way to go. The one used to kill Kemmler had been tested on a horse, but that, it seems, wasn’t quite enough to understand what might happen when you put a human in that chair. On August 6, 1890, Kemmler got up around 5 a.m., donned a suit and tie, had breakfast, and soon after had his head shaved. Head shaving still happens today. It ensures the head has a more perfect contract with the moistened electrodes on the chair’s helmet. At 6.38 a.m., in front of the prison warden and 17 witnesses, Kemmler uttered the last words, “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck. I believe I am going to a good place, and I am ready to go.” After 1,000 volts passed through his body for 17 seconds, the power was switched off, and he was confirmed a dead man, only for two physicians to note that Kemmler was far from dead. One man shouted, “Great God, he’s alive!” Kemmler was subsequently hit with a further 2,000 volts, after which his body caught fire and the blood vessels under his skin ruptured, causing him to bleed out. The entire operation took eight minutes. The New York Times wrote, “An awful odor began to permeate the death chamber, and then, as though to cap the climax of this fearful sight, it was seen that the hair under and around the electrode on the head and the flesh under and around the electrode at the base of the spine was singeing.” The sight was so horrific that one of the witnesses said using an axe would have been more humane. The New York Times wrote the headline, “Far Worse Than Hanging.” When Medina had his turn in the chair in ’97, the authorities took great care to choose the right sponge. They soaked one large sea sponge and two smaller ones in 9% saline: salt water. Saline is a better conductor of electricity. It helps the current travel in a more efficient line. Without this saline-soaked sponge, the body might cook, which would be rather unpleasant to witness. The officials soaked the sponges overnight in the saltwater. The large one was placed around his shaved right leg, and an 8-inch-long lead leg electrode was connected to his right calf. The headgear was leather, with an interior brass plate connected to a high-voltage wire. A wet and a dry sea sponge were also connected to the headgear. So far, so good. Everything was done as per protocol. When it was time to get down to business, the execution team applied an electroconductive gel to Medina’s shaved head. This not only helps with conductivity but lessens the chance of flames. When Medina walked over to the chair, he sat down and had straps placed around his chest, abdomen, legs, and arms. They fastened his head with a mouth and chin strap while the legs and head electrodes we discussed were connected. He was good to go. Standard procedure has changed over the years, so instead of one man pulling a lever, the process is automated. Like with firing squads, no one really wants to go home and tell the wife and kids that today they whacked a fella. The system, a programmed controlled circuitry system, was activated, and Medina was blasted three times. The first cycle lasted for eight minutes and consisted of 2,200 to 2,350 volts. The second 22 seconds but only 750 to 1,000 volts, and the third another 2,200 to 2,350 volts. As it was programmed to do, the system shut itself down four seconds in on the last cycle. It all added up to 35 seconds of shocks, starting at 7:04.50 A.M. and cutting off at 7:05.25 A.M. Medina was pronounced dead at 7:10. Some people later said not only was there smoke and fire but that he likely suffered an agonizing death. Although others said his brain was so fried, he would not have been conscious of pain. As for the reason for the fire, it was said to be a lack of saline, which caused the ignition of the dry sponge. Reports noted that dry sponges should not be used again, and instead of a 9% saline solution on the wet sponges, the entire sponge should be soaked in saline. The most recent person to get the chair in the US (Tennessee) was an undoubtedly heinous serial killer named Nicholas Sutton. His lawyers said he chose electrocution because lethal injection was so barbaric. Tennessee, like many other states with the death penalty, had previously deemed the chair barbaric, but the state has been having second thoughts of late, as have other states. Who knows if Sutton made the right decision, but it seems after his last meal of fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream, and his final words of “I’m just grateful to be a servant of God” his execution went without complications. He was the 163rd person to die in the electric chair since 1976. Before we talk about the most widely used and now most controversial method of murdering criminals, we need to discuss one other option currently available in some US states. That is, of course, lethal gas, which is on the books in Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Lethal injection is the primary method in these states, but gassing is still possible. You don’t hear about the lethal gas option very much. It’s only happened 11 times since 1976, with the last person to die in a US-made gas chamber ironically being German by birth. He was Walter LaGrand, a man who, with his brother, turned a bungled robbery in 1982 in Arizona into a murder case. Both men were in their late teens at the time of the murder. They’d both had tough lives, being mistreated in German orphanages before their mother, Emma, married an American soldier stationed in Augsburg, who adopted the two boys. The parents later split, and the boys became delinquent. One of the reasons for later controversies is they were never naturalized as Americans and Germans in the 1980s took a dim view of gassing their citizens to death. Both brothers, at first, asked to be gassed. It should be said that they thought they’d outsmart the system by choosing gas, thinking the courts would rule it unconstitutional. They didn’t. Karl eventually decided to go with lethal injection, but Walter made no such change of mind. The New York Times wrote at the time, “Walter LaGrand opted for the gas, with its resonance of the Holocaust for Germans.” The article quoted Germany’s former Justice Minister, who said, “This is barbaric and unworthy of a state based on the rule of law.” In terms of suffering, it turned out that Karl might have made the better decision. The men were executed just a week apart in 1999. While we’ve talked about nerves of steel today, Walter was far from stable on the big day. He was weeping as he lay strapped to a black chair, ready to be wheeled into the gas chamber. He apologized to the family of the bank manager he and his brother stabbed two dozen times, telling them, “To all of you here today, I forgive you, and I hope I can be forgiven in my next life.” The victim’s daughter looked on, holding a photo of her dad. Walter was then wheeled into the chamber. Most of the witnesses could only see the back of him, a shock of black hair above blue prison garb. Inside the chamber was a vat of distilled water and sulphuric acid, into which cyanide pellets were about to be dropped. This would cause a chain reaction and create a white cloud of hydrogen cyanide (HCN). This is what the Nazis used on over a million Jews during WW2. They named their killer potion Zyklon-B. It was a pesticide, first used in the USA, that contained more than hydrogen cyanide, but it was the cyanide that killed the victims. When the time came, the executioner pulled a lever, and the pellets dropped, causing a cloud of gas to choke Walter. Witnesses said when the cloud formed, it looked like a shower room mist enveloping him. This was not a sudden death by any means. Walter began choking and emitting strange, violent barking noises. The Tucson Citizen reported that witnesses saw “agonizing choking and gasping” as Walter slowly died over 18 minutes. Some witnesses, some of whom hated this man, became nauseated and had to walk out. Even when Walter was not moving, his head and arms twitched. His hands were said to be “red and clenched” throughout the ordeal. Even after he died, staff at the prison had to be careful not to inhale any gas. It was written in Arizona’s death chambers protocols at the time, “As a precautionary method, it is recommended that the team removing the body wear gas masks and rubber gloves and that the hair of the deceased inmate be ruffled in order to allow any residually trapped gas to escape.” Walter’s death took seven minutes longer than the previous gas chamber victim, Don Harding, who died of cyanide poisoning in Arizona on April 6, 1992. Harding impolitely unfurled his middle finger and screamed obscenities at witnesses who watched through the glass. He soon began choking, convulsing, his body overtaken by violent spasms. His lawyers called his demise “slow, painful, degrading, and inhumane.” Never again, said many Americans. Even some of the US’s most hardline death penalty proponents said lethal injection should replace lethal gas, not just because gassing was a torturous way to die, but because of its recent history in Germany. Even so, in 2021, the state of Arizona caused an international outcry when it was discovered it had purchased the ingredients to make cyanide gas that it intended to use to kill prisoners. It was reported that Arizona had selected two men from its death row population of 115 to be given the gas treatment. They are Frank Atwood, a 65-year-old man who murdered a girl in 1984, and Clarence Dixon, also 65, convicted of murdering a student in 1978. Awful crimes indeed, but the prospect of gassing men in the 2020s hasn’t gone down well with much of the world. One critic said, “You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?” The International Auschwitz Committee told the New York Times, “For Auschwitz survivors, the world will finally come apart at the seams if, in any place on this earth, the use of Zyklon B in the killing of human beings is considered again. He said it “insults the victims of the Holocaust.” So, why would a US state take such a big risk? Arizona must have known the outcry would happen at some point. The answer is the utter nightmare of lethal injection, which, over the last decade or so, has sounded like something from the best-selling book “The Satanist’s Guide to Sadistic Torture.” There is no book. We made that title up, but you get the picture. Here’s the evidence. In 2014, Arizona executed Joseph Woods, a man who had murdered his former girlfriend and her father in 1989. In what should have been a ten-minute procedure, Woods “gasped and snorted” for around two long hours. He was evidently in agony. A witness counted the gasps, telling the press he saw 660. One witness called the experience “very disturbing to watch … like a fish on shore gulping for air. At a certain point, you wondered whether he was ever going to die.” The family of the deceased were understandably unconcerned over Woods’ pain. One family member said, “Why didn’t we give him a bullet? Why didn’t we give him some Drano? These people that are on death row, they deserve to suffer a little bit.” Many Americans would agree. Still, when an execution takes two hours, and it seems as though the prisoner is in pain, in legal terms, it can be construed as cruel and unusual punishment. This kind of thing should not happen in modern American society. What’s certain in the Woods case is the cocktail of drugs he was given did not do the job. He was administered Midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a semi-synthetic opioid. As you know, opiates kill people all the time in the US, many tens of thousands each year, but the 15 doses Woods received didn’t do the job. There are much stronger opioids on the market that would no doubt be more effective. An opioid that’s been killing Americans in droves is Fentanyl. It’s 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, and morphine is only five to 10 times less potent than hydromorphone. In 2018, US authorities seized 120lbs (54kg) of fentanyl, which the media said was enough to kill 26 million people. So, more than a few Americans have asked, why not use fentanyl, or Carfentanil, which is 100 times stronger than normal fentanyl? You could take whole cities out with just a kilo of this stuff. Two milligrams can kill a person. Well, some states have gone down this route already. In 2018, Nebraska became the first state to execute a person – a killer of two cabbies – using fentanyl. The entire ordeal was over in 23 minutes. Even so, overdosing a person on such drugs brings up ethical and moral concerns, and there would be numerous legal challenges if it were to take off in other states. There’s also the fact that drug availability could be a problem. Countries around the world may not sell the drug to the US if it is to be used to murder someone. The US government wouldn’t be buying the stuff from some guy named Carlos, who lives on the Mexican border and has text messages on his phone from China. That statement is based on facts. The DEA wrote in 2020, “Mexico and China are the primary source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked directly into the United States.” It added, “India is emerging as a source for finished fentanyl powder and fentanyl precursor chemicals.” It seems Nebraska is the only state so far to send a person into eternal sleep using these super-powerful opiates, but as time goes on, in view of so many botched executions, perhaps it will catch on in more states. Most other states use a sedative medication, such as Pentobarbital. This is injected through an intravenous saline drip. A drug to paralyze the muscles will follow. Such a drug might be pancuronium bromide, which will paralyze the muscles in the diaphragm, making it so the condemned person can’t breathe. Potassium chloride, a potassium salt, is also often used. This causes an abnormal heartbeat that can cause death by cardiac arrest. Some of these drugs have since been banned for export in the EU under its Torture Regulations, making it difficult for some states to implement this mortal three-step plan. The drugs must be administered separately to achieve the desired effect: unconsciousness through the barbiturate, paralysis through the pancuronium bromide, and a subsequent collapse of the lungs and the diaphragm. The heart drug should do the rest…should. The intravenous line will usually come from outside the execution chamber or at least at the other side of a curtain. One prison employee will insert the needle in the arm, which isn’t always easy, especially if the prisoner has a history of sticking syringes into his traumatized veins. Another employee will be at the controls. Physicians often won’t participate in the murder due to their adherence to medical ethics, the Hippocratic oath, which says they cannot take lives. Some do join the executions. It’s a matter of controversy. As we said, sometimes the executions fail because the IV cannot be inserted. This happened in 2009 with an extremely violent man, Romell Broom, although given his past of hurting children, there wasn’t much sympathy for him. Still, his two-hour ordeal with his hard-to-find veins led his lawyers to claim he’d “sustained both physical and mental injuries.” He got a reprieve but died in prison from COVID-19 in 2020. Otherwise, he was scheduled to die in 2022. 27 US states have lethal injection on their books as a form of execution. Since 1976, there have been 1,389 such executions. Over the last decade or so, many have been botched, including that of another vicious killer, Clayton Lockett. The staff couldn’t get the needle into a vein. A paramedic at first failed with Lockett’s forearm and bicep, and then a doctor on the scene failed to stick him in the jugular vein. He came up short and then tried for the collarbone. Lockett lay there as another paramedic joined in, failing with Lockett’s feet but succeeding with the femoral vein in the groin. By this time, Lockett’s body looked like it had been attacked by the spear-throwing Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels. Because of Oklahoma’s drug supply issues, in part thanks to the EU ban, they had to use different drugs from the usual. It seems the new concoction was a brutal way to do it, what one person called “horrific” due to the pain. The drug that would have lessened the anguish had been removed from the package. Three minutes after Lockett was declared unconscious, he suddenly was far from unconscious. In a state of utter confusion, he could be heard saying, “Oh, man,” and “I’m not…” and “Something’s wrong.” All this time, he was trying to get up. Yet again, we have a scene from a horror movie. The operation was called “torture” by the media and human rights organizations. “Barbarism,” said some media, adding it was “inappropriate in a civilized society.” This man had committed atrocious violent crimes. He’d buried one of his victims alive, but still, was the botched execution not out of place in our modern world, people asked? Lockett’s story is just one of many failed executions in recent years where lethal injection is concerned. There have been stories of men’s eyes popping open when they should have been dead. Recently, a man’s body jerked almost two dozen times before he vomited down his neck. In 2022, the three-hour execution of Joe Nathan James Jr. was botched. An autopsy revealed numerous puncture wounds and lacerations. This was the longest execution in modern US history. James may have been a killer, but his ordeal, it was said, still violated his constitutional protections. Alabama is no stranger to such botched executions. Joe Nathan James Jr.’s ordeal was an Alabama special, as was the 2018 case of convicted murderer Doyle Lee Hamm, who was punctured numerous times for 2.5 hours before they gave up on finding a vein. His sentence was commuted to life, but he died of cancer-related complications in 2021. The state now wants to try nitrogen hypoxia, replacing oxygen breathed by the condemned with nitrogen. While this hasn’t been tested yet, one expert called it “astonishingly cruel.” A mask will be placed over the person’s face, after which the nitrogen will be pumped into his lungs for up to 15 minutes. This method has also been approved for Mississippi and Oklahoma, which are also reeling from many botched and embarrassing lethal injections. The man we talked about in the intro, a guy named Kevin Smith, is one of the people who may also get the nitrogen treatment. Smith had taken $1,000 to kill a man’s wife in 1996. The man, a minister, was having an affair and was in debt, so wanted the insurance money. The short story is Smith killed her. During his botched execution in 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a stay at around 8 p.m., overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court at 10 p.m. Smith was on the gurney all this time, unaware he’d been saved and un-saved. Prison officials couldn’t get the IV in before midnight when his death warrant expired. He lived to see another day. Also, in 2022, the state failed to execute the killer of three, Alan Eugene Miller, again, because they couldn’t get the IV into his veins. The state later agreed to never try lethal injection on him again, so it’s starting to look like there’s a chance Alabama might soon be pulling out its nitrogen masks. The state is now desperate to avoid another botched execution. Lethal injection has a very high botch rate of 7.12%, compared to 5.4% for gas, 3.12% for hanging, 1.92% for the electric chair, and 0% for the firing squad. It should also be said that lethal injection in these terrible recent times has a botch rate of 30%! The firing squad is seen as barbaric, a bit too personal, and too messy, just as the Guillotine, which would cause a person the least amount of pain and never fails, is viewed as something from our less civilized past. Even so, if you had the choice of how you’d be executed, we imagine which box you’d tick. We know which box we’d tick, despite the fact an open casket would be out of the question. Now you need to watch “Degrees of Murder – What Do They Mean?” Or watch this instead!