LAST October, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the 9th U.S. District Court ruled that execution in California’s gas chamber is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, the first ruling ever by a state or federal judge to invalidate a method of execution on Eighth Amendment grounds. She noted that the evidence showed that the condemned man might remain conscious for several minutes, experiencing the emotions of “anxiety, panic, terror,” as well as “exquisitely painful muscle spasms” and “intense visceral pain.”
On its face, Judge Patel’s ruling applies only to the gas chamber, but every method of execution in current use involves toxic chemicals or physical trauma to induce death—and every method can go awry. An ideal hanging snaps the condemned man’s neck cleanly; a botched one either strangles him slowly or severs the head entirely from the body. A firing squad that misses its mark leaves the condemned man conscious as he bleeds to death. In the electric chair, according to eyewitness accounts, some condemned men have literally been cooked until their flesh was charred and loosened from the bone; some had sparks and flame emanating from their cranial-cap electrodes.
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