Tennessee moves to bring back the electric chair

Tenessee: As the use of drugs to execute convicted prisoners increasingly is challenged on legal and ethical grounds, Tennessee has a back-up plan. It will use the electric chair instead.

Gov Bill Haslam (R) signed a bill Thursday that gives the state the option to electrocute death-row inmates if it is unable to obtain drugs for lethal injections or if lethal injection is declared unconstitutional.

The law comes as states that practice capital punishment struggle to secure execution drugs. European suppliers have stopped selling them for purposes of execution in protest of the death penalty.

Some states have since resorted to getting the drugs from state-regulated pharmacies that they refuse to name, to protect the businesses from protests. But the questions of whether states have a right to do so – or if inmates have a right to vet the source and quality of the drugs – are the subject of an unresolved legal debate playing out in courtrooms across the US.

A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Corrections said that it does not keep lethal injection drug supplies “on hand,” but “we are confident we will be able to secure the necessary chemicals when needed.”

Tennessee had already allowed some condemned inmates to select electrocution instead of lethal injection. But the new law allows the state to choose electrocution for inmates who are condemned to death after July 1, 2014, if the state is unable to obtain one or more of the ingredients in a cocktail of lethal injection drugs. The legislation also allows the state to use electrocution if lethal injection is ever ruled unconstitutional.

“They’re ensuring that they have a method of execution,” says Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and an expert on the history of capital punishment in the US. “They’re playing it safe, so to speak.”

That Tennessee has chosen an execution method from the past is an unusual move, she says. States typically have tried one method of execution, then abandoned it for a new procedure thought to be an improvement. But states have never before gone backward, she says.

“States have followed this progression, going from one method of execution to another,” Professor Denno says. “A state wanting to go back to what we had before is unprecedented. We’re regressing.”

The electric chair, first used in a New York execution in 1890, was introduced as a replacement for hanging – a “barbarous” holdover from “the dark ages,” as the then-New York governor put it, according to Denno. But its results proved grisly. Some states, beginning in 1921, ditched it for the gas chamber, though that also produced grotesque displays of suffering.

By 2009, all of the death penalty states had settled on lethal injection as their default method. The US Supreme Court has never ruled any method of execution to be unconstitutional. Two states, Nebraska and Georgia, have declared electrocution to be unconstitutional. Only six of the 32 states that have capital punishment offer electrocution as a possible execution method, according to Denno’s forthcoming article in Georgetown Law Review.