Ga. High Court Relegates Electric Chair to History

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state can no longer use the electric chair to execute condemned criminals, saying “its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains” constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

The court’s 4-3 decision marks the first time an appellate court has issued such a ruling against use of the electric chair--introduced in the U.S. in 1890.

Previously, legislatures in 23 of the 38 states that have capital punishment banned the electric chair.

Currently, Alabama and Nebraska use only the electric chair for executions. Several other states give a condemned inmate the option of death by electrocution or injection.

Death by electrocution “inflicts purposeless physical violence and needless mutilation that makes no measurable contribution to accepted goals of punishment,” Georgia Supreme Court Justice Carol W. Hunstein wrote in her majority opinion.

“The evidence . . . reveals uncontrovertedly that the bodies of condemned prisoners in Georgia are mutilated during the electrocution process,” Hunstein added. “The state’s experts concur that the brains of the condemned prisoners are destroyed in a process that cooks them at temperatures between 135 degrees and 145 degrees Fahrenheit.”

In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Hugh P. Thompson said the decision “reflects not the evolving standards of decency of the people of Georgia, but the evolving opinions of the majority members of this court.”

The ruling was hailed by Stephen B. Bright, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who argued before Georgia’s high court on behalf of a death row inmate.

“This decision ends the degrading spectacle of smoke, fire and burning flesh that almost every other modern society in the world has abandoned,” Bright said. “The electric chair has been like the chain gang: a symbol of the harshness and discrimination of the criminal justice system in Georgia.

Bright said that since Georgia started using the electric chair in 1924, four times as many African Americans as whites have been electrocuted. The state’s last electrocution was in 1998.

Georgia currently has 128 people on death row. Under a law passed last year, anyone sentenced to death for a capital crime after May 1, 2000, would be executed by injection, but those sentenced to death before that still would have been electrocuted.

Led by Bright, attorneys for death row inmates argued that evolving standards of decency militated for total abolition of the chair--arguing among other things that even veterinary associations no longer permit electrocution to be used to euthanize animals.

“Surely, surely you have a higher standard for people than you have for animals,” Bright said during arguments.

Georgia Atty. Gen. Thurbert Baker said Friday he was “extremely disappointed” in the decision. But he said there would be no appeal because the court had decided the case solely on the basis of Georgia law.

“The Georgia Supreme Court has the final say on interpreting the Georgia Constitution, and there is simply no further appeal,” Baker said.

Although the decision comes amid increasing national debate about whether the death penalty is inflicted equitably in the U.S., one judge issued a separate concurring opinion stressing that the ruling “has no impact whatsoever on the viability of the death penalty in Georgia”--directly responding to a contention made by a prosecutor at the oral argument.

“The only issue considered and addressed by the Court in this matter is whether electrocution as a means of effectuating death sentences comports with evolving standards of decency under the Georgia Constitution,” Justice Leah J. Sears wrote.

Deborah W. Denno, a Fordham University law professor who has written articles about methods of execution, called the ruling “very significant because it is unprecedented.”

Denno said a number of courts--including the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court--have ruled previously “that there was not enough evidence or no evidence to show that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment.

Senior Assistant Atty. Gen. Susan Boleyn had argued that electricity travels to the brain considerably faster than feelings of pain, and that the condemned inmate is rendered unconscious instantaneously.

“It would be impossible for a person being judicially executed to feel pain,” Boleyn said.

But Bright argued that the electric chair sometimes caused lingering pain and frequently led to disfigurement.

Another defense lawyer, Thomas W. West, showed the judges an autopsy photo of a man executed in 1986, with a red mark around the part of his head where a skull cap had been placed by prison officials before the execution.

Ultimately, the majority concluded that it was not possible to determine conclusively whether unnecessary pain is inflicted through use of the electric chair.

But that does not resolve the question, Hunstein wrote. “Such a limited focus would lead to the abhorrent situation where a condemned prisoner could be burned at the stake or crucified as long as he or she were rendered incapable by medication of consciously experiencing the pain, even though such punishments have long been recognized as ‘manifestly cruel and unusual.’ ”

“We cannot ignore the cruelty inherent in punishments that unnecessarily mutilate or disfigure the condemned prisoner’s body or the unusualness that mutilation creates in light of viable alternatives which minimize or eliminate the pain or mutilation,” Hunstein added.

In addition to Hunstein and Sears, Chief Justice Norman S. Fletcher and Associate Justice Robert Benham joined in the ruling. The majority said that they had taken their lead from last year’s action by the Georgia Legislature.

“That statute represents the clearest and most objective evidence of how contemporary society views a particular punishment, inasmuch as that significant a change in the law amounts to evidence of the shifting or evolution of the societal consensus,” Hunstein wrote.

Thompson, joined by Justices George H. Carley and Harris P. Hines, sharply disagreed.

“As this case illustrates, legislatures are better suited to determining the contemporary than are the courts,” Thompson wrote. “If the General Assembly sought to abolish electrocution as a method of execution, it could have done so. It could have established lethal injection as the sole means of execution for all condemned inmates in this state, but it did not.”

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court was prepared to hear a challenge to Florida’s use of the electric chair, after some highly publicized botched executions. In one 1997 case, a crown of flames shot from the inmate’s head during the execution. Before the challenge could be heard by the high court, Florida adopted injection for executions.

There are a number of appeals pending in Alabama in which condemned inmates are challenging the use of the electric chair.