The Tennessean has a story today on how the state will test the electric chair it will use to kill Edmund Zagorski next Thursday. The details are gruesome, and should compel every one of us to question what kind of society we live in that we would allow human beings to be executed by the state. Electrocution is a particularly barbaric way to kill someone, but make no mistake, there is literally no such thing as a humane execution of a man or woman who doesn’t want to die.
Some of the tests the state will run over the next few days will include making sure the proper voltage is running through the chair’s electrical cables and conducting run-throughs of the timed cycle of electric jolts that will be sent through the prisoner’s head.
Zagorski, who is 63 years old, was sentenced to death for the murder of two men, John Dale Dotson and Jimmy Porter in 1983. He opted for the electric chair over the state’s other approved method of lethal injection because, he said in an affidavit, “I do not want to be subjected to the torture of the current lethal injection method.”
You can read the Tennessean’s story here.