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    Kelly Oliver on “A Brief History of the Electric Chair”

    Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice has launched a blog series on issues raised by mass incarceration and the death penalty.  This week's post is by Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University.  Oliver describes the "war of currents" between Edison and Westinhouse that led to the invention of the electric chair and the domination of the electricity market by a company backed by Edison:

    Edison had invested himself in direct current electricity while Westinghouse had invested in alternating current, which could be more easily transmitted at higher voltages over cheaper wires. In a campaign to discredit alternating current, Edison tried to convince people that it wasn’t safe, first by using it to electrocute animals and eventually by endorsing it for use in executing humans. Edison reasoned that people would not want the same current flowing into their homes that was used in the electric chair.

    In public demonstrations to discredit Westinghouse, Edison reportedly executed so many stray cats and dogs, often in circuslike spectacles involving first shocking the animals with direct current and then killing them instantly with alternating current, that the area near his lab in Menlo Park New Jersey was almost devoid of strays. In 1887, he held a public demonstration in West Orange New Jersey, where he used a Westinghouse generator to kill a dozen animals at once, which spurred the media to use a new term to describe death by electricity, “electrocution.”

    Oliver's post, and her further work on the death penalty in The Southern Journal of Philosophy  and in her book, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment, offers a much-needed historical context for recent legislation allowing a return to electrocution in Tennessee, and for ongoing debates about capital punishment across the US.

    Read the full post here.

     

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    2 responses to “Kelly Oliver on “A Brief History of the Electric Chair””

    1. Gordon Hull Avatar
      Gordon Hull

      Here’s a take on the constitutionality of Tennessee’s reversion to the electric chair – the gist of the argument is that it’s really bizarre to go back to a method of execution that’s generally viewed as barbaric:
      http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2014/05/turning-back-to-electrocution-reversing-the-eighth-amendment-ratchet.html
      The first comment is weird, but there’s an interesting debate right after it b/t the author of the post and Orin Kerr on what it takes for a practice to be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual (i.e., whether you need an official court declaration or whether you can get there by existing practice)

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    2. Lisa N Guenther Avatar
      Lisa N Guenther

      Thanks for posting this! The first comment actually raises a question that I get a lot in public lectures: Why not just OD them on barbituates (or whatever)? Louisiana is considering nitrous oxide (which my dentist called “happy nose” to kill people in gas chambers again – http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/05/death_by_nitrogen_gas_will_the_new_method_of_execution_save_the_death_penalty.html). The TN Attorney General was asked for his opinion on the bill to make electrocution the default method of execution if lethal injection drugs are factually unavailable. This is what he wrote: http://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/op/2014/op14-29.pdf Even though he claims that the bill is defensible, the last paragraph acknowledges that at least one state has found electrocution to be unconstitutional: “More recently, the Nebraska Supreme Court held that electrocution was unconstitutional under its state constitution, whose cruel-and-unusual-punishment language mirrors that of the federal and Tennessee Constitutions. See State v. Mata, 275 Neb. 1, 745 N.W.2d 229 (2008). The court noted that it had upheld electrocution as constitutional as recently as 2000 but stated that its previous decision had not relied on a factual record “showing electrocution’s physiological effects on a prisoner.” The court also noted that Nebraska was the only state imposing electrocution as its sole method of execution. Mata, 275 Neb. at 32, 745 N.W.2d at 256-57.” Even if electrocution is not found to be unconstitutional as such, in TN or in the US, this “backwards” move has given people on death row a whole new set of issues to litigate!

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