Humane Death by Gas Has History of Doubters : Executions: Witnesses describe the final minutes as horrifying. ‘The idea that cyanide kills immediately is hooey,’ a health official said in 1938.

It did not take long for questions to arise about executions by gas: The designer of California’s gas chamber boasted that it would “snuff out life” in 15 seconds, yet it took a pig three minutes to die in the first test at San Quentin in 1938.

Humans have often taken more than 10 minutes to be pronounced dead, after long bouts of gasping and convulsions that have also served to sicken more than a few eyewitnesses.

That was the case when Robert Lee Cannon and Albert Kessell became the first two inmates to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

“The idea that cyanide kills immediately is hooey,” said San Francisco Health Director Dr. J. C. Geiger shortly after witnessing their 1938 executions. “These men suffered.”

And it remained true as recently as this month, when Arizona inmate Don Eugene Harding was pronounced dead 10 minutes and 31 seconds after a prison guard released a lever dropping one pound of sodium cyanide pellets into a vat containing six quarts of distilled water and six pints of sulfuric acid.

“Three minutes into (Harding’s) ordeal,” wrote eyewitness Charles Kelly, an Arizona Republic reporter, “his head falls and rises, and a violent trembling is visible in his upper arms and back--an involuntary flickering of nerves and muscles, as if bugs are racing about underneath the skin.”

In temporarily halting all gas chamber executions in California, U. S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled Saturday night that there was ample evidence presented by American Civil Liberties Union lawyers to require a court hearing on whether death by gas may be deemed cruel and unusual punishment.

The civil rights lawsuit, filed on behalf of Robert Alton Harris and California’s 330 other condemned killers, brands lethal gas “barbaric” and points out that “the same gas--known by its trade name Zyklon B--(was) used by the Nazis to exterminate over a million men and women at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”

The suit includes declarations from doctors, execution eyewitnesses and Holocaust survivors about the painful effects of gas.

“As a person who saw the daily horror of mass extermination by gas,” states survivor Gloria Lyons, “I know that execution by gas is torture, and it can never be anything else.”

Lethal gas works by blocking the body’s ability to process oxygen, thus, in essence, suffocating its victim. When first put to use in California, the gas chamber was viewed by proponents as a technologically advanced, humane alternative to the gruesome method of hanging.

Now, state prison officials defend lethal gas as a less painful form of death than electrocution or firing squad, and a less emotionally traumatizing experience for prison guards than lethal injection, which requires hands-on contact.

But officials here are decidedly in the minority.

Of the 36 states that have capital punishment, only California, Arizona and Maryland mandate the use of gas. Arizona is considering a switch to lethal injections after the Harding execution.

Over the years, several lawsuits have been filed in lower courts in other states to prohibit the use of lethal gas. But the U. S. Supreme Court, which is expected to have the final word on the ACLU lawsuit, has never ruled definitively on whether gas is a constitutional form of execution.

Boalt Hall law professor Franklin Zimring, a death penalty expert, said Sunday that if lethal gas was ruled cruel and unusual punishment, the Legislature would probably authorize another method of capital punishment quickly.

“I would guess the California Legislature would substitute lethal injections for gas or would provide alternatives that leave it up to the subject,” the UC Berkeley professor said. “North Carolina gives a choice.”

A bill to authorize the use of “state-of-the-art” syringes was introduced to the Legislature by Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) in 1987. But the bill--which drew opposition from civil rights advocates who believe that no form of execution is humane and from prison officials worried that it would fuel more legal challenges--died in committee in 1988.