Georgia court strikes down use of electric chair


Associated Press


The 4-3 ruling by the Georgia Supreme Court leaves Alabama and Nebraska as the only states with the electric chair as the sole method of execution. A few states that once relied exclusively on the chair now offer condemned inmates a choice of electrocution or lethal injection.

The ruling is believed to be the first time a state's highest court has struck down use of the electric chair as cruel and unusual.

With the decision, Georgia automatically switched to lethal injection for the 128 men and one woman on death row, as well as those sentenced to death in the future.

The court said electrocution "inflicts purposeless physical violence and needless mutilation." The justices criticized the electric chair for its "specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies," especially since most states have switched to lethal injection, a procedure the court called "less painful, less barbarous."

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 to turn away an Alabama case challenging the electric chair, but it remained unclear whether the court would use some other case to review the legitimacy of electrocutions.

The Georgia Constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" is almost identical in its wording to the one in the U.S. Constitution.

"This decision ends the degrading spectacle of smoke, fire and burning flesh that almost every other modern society in the world has abandoned," said Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who argued against electrocution before the Georgia court.

Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker, whose office fought to preserve electrocution, said that he would not appeal the ruling but that he felt the court was substituting its opinion "for the will of the people of Georgia."

Georgia has used the electric chair since 1924, when it replaced hanging. A total of 441 people have been put to death in the chair, the last in 1998 when 39-year-old David Loomis Cargill was electrocuted for the armed robberies and murders of a couple in 1985.

The Legislature, anticipating Friday's ruling, had set lethal injection as the penalty for capital crimes committed after May 1, 2000, but left electrocution in place for those already under death penalty. However, the law provided an automatic switch to lethal injection if electrocution was ruled illegal.

The court's majority cited that legislation as a sign of an evolving consensus in Georgia against the electric chair. The court's three dissenters, however, said the majority opinion represented only "the evolving opinions of the majority members of this court."

During arguments before the court, the state cited expert opinions that electrocution brings immediate unconsciousness. Bright and others cited their own experts who said those undergoing electrocution could be conscious for some time.

The court said it could not determine conclusively whether the electric chair inflicts unnecessary pain, but added, "We cannot ignore the cruelty inherent in punishments that unnecessarily mutilate or disfigure the condemned prisoner's body."


