Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 15, 1993 TAG: 9303150078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATTHEW BOWERS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
LAWYERS LOOK FOR FORUM TO BATTLE AGAINST ELECTRIC CHAIR
Richmond lawyers, citing experts who say the electric chair inflicts undue suffering, are pushing for the courts to outlaw it.Blood and body fluids boil. Third-degree burns erupt on the scalp and legs. Muscles seize. Breathing becomes impossible. The body cooks from the inside out. Finally, after a few minutes, the heart stops.
This is how the electric chair kills, according to expert witnesses in a recent capital case.
These experts call such executions legalized torture - certainly "cruel and unusual" - and therefore illegal under the Constitution.
But another expert calls this scenario "silly," saying the jolt of electricity literally beats the pain to the brain and the condemned prisoner feels nothing.
More than 100 years after the electric chair was first used as an execution device, these arguments about pain and suffering have yet to be made in open court. They would have been heard last month in a capital murder case in Loudoun County, but a reduced charge at the last minute rendered the point moot.
Now, volunteer lawyers from two high-powered Richmond firms trying to ban the chair, which is used in Virginia and 12 other states, are looking for a new legal forum. They are backed by at least two medical experts who say electrocuted prisoners feel the burning and suffocating the whole time.
"Basically, our viewpoint is that nobody has had a hearing on the issue of whether electrocution is unnecessarily painful," said Dorothy C. Young, a lawyer with McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe.
Lawyers from Young's firm and Hunton & Williams represent condemned prisoner Syvasky L. Poyner, scheduled to die Thursday night for murdering five women in 11 days in 1984.
A U.S. District Court judge in Richmond repeatedly has agreed to let Poyner's lawyers videotape executions or electric-chair tests and participate in autopsies of executed prisoners, but he has been overruled each time by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As a result, there has been no hearing on evidence of suffering.
A state judge in Loudoun was going to let Poyner's lawyers argue their view last month in another murder case, but a hearing on the issue was canceled after prosecutors reduced a capital murder charge in a robbery-slaying. Now, the defense team isn't sure where to turn, although it could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In originally granting the hearing, Circuit Judge James H. Chamblin said his research found that only "blind adherence" to an 1890 Supreme Court ruling that electrocution was not cruel or unusual. But that case was decided before the first execution in an electric chair and was necessarily speculative.
"Certainly science and technology has advanced an awful lot since 1890," the judge said this month. "And I feel that somewhere a court has got to hear the evidence of what the state-of-the-art is now on the effect of electricity on the human body."
Poyner's attorneys agree.
"Our allegations are that electrocution is unnecessarily painful in general, and as administered by the commonwealth of Virginia," Young said. "What we're trying to do is bring it back to the people, the fact that not only it hurts but it probably is agony."
Two physician-professors, one in New York and one in England, swore in affidavits that they had studied autopsies of executed prisoners, read witness accounts and interviewed survivors of accidental shocks. Their conclusions were identical.
They said electricity follows the path of least resistance - sweaty, oily skin - and skips the skull, which is more resistant to electricity. In electrocutions, the muscles contract, causing the body to lunge forward and freeze in place. Body fluids heat up and flow out, and the skin burns at the electrode contact points. The pain is excruciating for a few minutes while the body and brain get hot enough to die, they said.
The condemned person feels it all, they said, because the brain isn't knocked out. Autopsies reveal little evident damage to the brain.
"There is no medical or scientific support for the proposition that intentional electrocution for execution causes immediate brain death and the subject experiences no pain," wrote Dr. Orrin Devinsky of the New York University School of Medicine.
Dr. Harold Hillman of the University of Surrey in England agreed. "The condemned subject retains consciousness long enough to feel conscious pain," Hillman wrote in his affidavit.
As examples, they point to two recent Virginia executions. In October 1990, blood flowed from under the leather mask covering Wilbert L. Evans' face when he was electrocuted. And in August 1991, witnesses watched Derick L. Peterson wheeze and moan between the two jolts of electricity in the 12 minutes it took to kill him.
But a Florida medical examiner and electrocution expert, cited by the state attorney general's office, says prisoners feel no pain.
"You can just say it absolutely, positively, flat-footedly, just because of the way it works," said Dr. Ronald K. Wright, chief medical examiner for Broward County, a pathology professor, lawyer - and a death-penalty opponent.
He has studied electricity and the human body and performed autopsies within 20 minutes of some executions, and concluded that electricity literally beats the pain to the brain.
Only a tiny fraction of the electricity in an execution is needed to short-circuit the brain's nerves, and even if most is diverted by the skull, enough still enters the brain to do the job, Wright said.
Electricity travels at the speed of light - 587 times faster than pain travels through nerve endings - rendering the brain incapable of registering feelings that aren't there yet, he said.
Wright said Virginia does it correctly, with a short, high-powered spurt of electricity that kills feeling in the brain, followed by a longer stream of less-powerful charge to destroy life in the body.
"It's gruesome for the onlookers," he said. "You know, you cook these people, for God's sake. But it doesn't hurt."