Finding a Way of Killing We Can Live With

Sometime this spring, if all goes as predicted, we the people of California will cause Robert Alton Harris to be strapped into our 1937-model gas chamber. The door will be sealed behind him, and Harris will await the first whiff of something that smells like rotten eggs.

No one has died like this in California since 1967, although we now have 272 prisoners waiting their turn on Death Row. If you had to choose someone to break the logjam, Harris is as good a choice as any. His was the kind of murder that seems to beg for revenge. On a hot day in San Diego, Harris kidnaped two teen-agers from a Jack-in-the-Box, took them to a secluded spot and shot them dead, more or less to see what it felt like. Then he munched on their leftover hamburgers.

Maybe you like the idea of Harris taking the gas at San Quentin, maybe not. It’s not my purpose to engage that debate today. Let’s assume that California will stand fast in its resolve to resume official killings, and take up another question. Namely, if we are going to kill these people, how should we do it?

This issue is neither small nor merely technical. Opponents of the death penalty claim that no method of execution is humane, and that may be true. But some methods are quick, others are slow. Some tend to be grotesque, and some have a greater chance of making the condemned person suffer. The differences are real.

For half a century, of course, California has remained committed to the gas chamber. San Quentin’s fame as a prison is based largely on Hollywood’s depiction of its executions, where feathery gas always curls around the victim’s nose. What Sing Sing is to the electric chair, San Quentin is to the gas chamber.

When it was mandated by the Legislature in 1937, the use of hydrogen cyanide was regarded as a move toward modernity in California. A gas chamber was seen as an impersonal machine, somehow more distant and civilized than the previously used gallows, which carried implications of frontier coarseness.

But that impression may be more apparent than real. After hundreds of executions by gas, it is still not known how long it takes for a person to lose consciousness within the chamber. Cyanide kills by blocking oxygen uptake at the cellular level. In effect, the victim suffocates as every breath introduces more cyanide into his lungs, shutting out more oxygen.

The question of time-to-unconsciousness is crucial because the descent into death from cyanide is not pretty. Here’s a description of gas death once offered by Clinton Duffy, warden of San Quentin during the 1940s: “At first there is evidence of extreme horror, pain and strangling. The eyes pop. The skin turns purple, and the victim begins to drool. It is a horrible sight. Witnesses faint. It is finally as though he has gone to sleep. The body, however, is not disfigured or mutilated in any way.”

When Caryl Chessman took the gas in 1960, he told reporters he would nod if his death was painful. And nod he did for some 15 grim seconds. You have to wonder, as he went into convulsions, if he was consoled by the knowledge that he was not being disfigured.

It was, in fact, this torturous aspect of cyanide gas that led the Geneva Convention to outlaw its use in warfare.

But if not gas, then what? Keep in mind we are assuming here, arguendo , that we are going to kill these people somehow.

California could follow 17 other states and introduce lethal injection as the method of choice. Sadly, it turns out that lethal injection has problems of its own. A number of executions have been botched, leaving the executees writhing on their gurneys for many minutes. And injection is slow at best, sometimes taking an hour from insertion of intravenous to death.

Ironically, many wardens and execution specialists--yes, they do exist--have lately begun to advocate methods once regarded as outmoded. Hanging, if done properly, can be a quick procedure and produce nearly instantaneous loss of consciousness. Ditto for electrocution, where loss of consciousness from a 2,000-volt shock has been measured at 4.1 milliseconds.

The truth is, there are probably no perfect methods of execution. Humans die hard, and killing them invariably requires some level of grisliness. But as California edges toward a new round of executions, maybe it’s time that we reconsider just which grisliness we are prepared to embrace.