The New York Times

Tuesday, November 9, 1999

Cruel and Unusual

By SHERWIN B. NULAND

NEW HAVEN -- A swift and painless death is a mercy that few of us will be granted. Disease and aging do not often complete their lethal work without laying down lengthy and devastating barrages. Even the so-called "sudden death" of major injury is all too commonly accompanied by seconds or even minutes of anguish. But of all trauma victims, the murdered are most likely to end their lives in some form of agony and terror.

And so, some find it paradoxical that when murderers are to be executed, our society often tries to provide them with the painless death that only a small number of us will have been granted by nature or fortune. This paradox stands out anew with the announcement that the Supreme Court will soon decide whether Florida's use of the electric chair constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Electrocution is the only method of capital punishment in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Nebraska. It is a choice given to the condemned in Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia. What is specifically feared by those on death row, according to court papers, is that they will undergo "physical violence, disfigurement and torment" during the process of dying.

If the court decides that murderers deserve a quietus of which they have deprived others, then the electric chair should unquestionably be abolished as a method of execution.

Even when it functions exactly as it should, the electric chair is a brutal killer. It depends on three jolts of electricity -- some 2,000 volts each, traveling from head to foot for anywhere from 8 seconds to 20 seconds. When performance is optimal, a very small circumference of burnt skin will be produced at points of entrance and exit, but not much else will be visible. For this to happen, the electrodes and their attachments must be perfectly placed, resistance must be minimal and all parts of the electrical apparatus -- like the generator, switches and wiring -- must be in excellent working order.

Technical failures in any part of this complex apparatus can result in a failure of the entire system. This explains the botched executions we occasionally read about: the sparking, the smoke and flame and the need for repeated shocks in a subject who may still be at least partially conscious.

If the electrical system does work perfectly, what then? What is the mechanism of death? Ideally, passage of current through the head and into the trunk should instantly cause unconsciousness, although it simultaneously stimulates acute contractions of virtually every muscle in the body. If the condemned is at all conscious, such contractions are exquisitely painful.

Death may be caused in any of several ways. By passing through the cardiac center in the brain's medulla, the current arrests the heart. By passing through the respiratory center, it stops breathing and asphyxiates the subject. By passing through the heart, it distorts normal ventricular rhythm into an ineffective wormlike wriggling called fibrillation, which has the same effect as cardiac arrest.

All of these mechanisms take more than two minutes to cause brain death, the legal definition of the end of life. Should the initial shock not render the subject fully unconscious, he remains aware of what is happening, particularly if he is being asphyxiated, a situation appallingly obvious at autopsy.

Compared to the effectiveness and ease of executions carried out by lethal injection, electrocution is a barbaric way to kill someone. Unless revenge is what our society wants -- and some would indeed say that such a goal is justifiable -- the court's path is clear: the electric chair should be forbidden. The answer is as simple as that.

Sherwin B. Nuland, a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, is the author of "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter."