The Switch

By John Allen

Once upon a time, executions were more art than science. Designed for show, they aimed to send off the condemned with a sense of poetic justice.

In the time of Henry VIII, for instance, executioners put a lot of thought and creativity into making death horrible. When three priests were convicted of treason in 1535, each had to face this end: he was hanged by the neck until almost (but not quite) dead; then executioners cut him down, revived him, slit open his torso, and slowly fed his intestines into a pot of boiling water. Just before each victim expired, his executioners plucked out his still-living heart, held it before his face, and said, "Behold, here beats the heart of a traitor!"

At least that was the plan. In practice, both the executioners and the condemned probably had trouble sticking to the script.

Today executions aim more for science than spectacle. Still, just as Renaissance England's theatrical executions say much about that society, the silent, technical proceedings of America's death houses say something about our own. In the U.S., at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the penalty for some crimes is still death, though we look on boiled intestines and bloody heads as relics of barbarism. When President Bush announced the death of Timothy McVeigh, killed by lethal injection in June, he left out any ominous drama about the hearts of traitors. Rather, with careful understatement, he said simply, "There has been a reckoning."

Of course, the muted satisfaction of Bush's announcement wasn't universal. Many Americans opposed the execution; others believed that McVeigh's end had come too easily. "He didn't suffer at all," one survivor of the Murrah Building bombing told the Associated Press. "I think they should have done the same thing to him that he did in Oklahoma."

But such dissenting opinion is more the exception than the rule. America, like the rest of Western civilization, prefers its justice to appear dispassionate and utilitarian. Thus, ever since the Age of Reason, nations have turned to science to remove incorrigible criminals in a way that is, if not quite kind, at least swift and relatively painless.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, a whole field of technological innovation sprang up to give the world's governments more enlightened ways to kill: Dr. Guillotin's beheading machine was an improvement upon the ax-wielder's haphazard strokes; Spain's garrote cut short a lengthy strangulation by breaking its victim's neck; and England, in the nineteenth century, developed hangman's tables, which calculated how to apply exactly 1,260 foot-pounds of energy to a victim's neck so that the rope would immediately sever the spinal cord but leave the head attached. Each innovation was aimed at modernizing executions. The goal was that justice should avoid excessive cruelty and quietly remove a criminal from society.

At least that was the plan. In practice, each nation has had a hard time translating clean, scientific hypotheses into consistently painless death. You won't find a working guillotine or garrote in the world today.

According to UW-Madison Emeritus Professor Theodore Bernstein '49, MS'55, PhD'59, the curious science of "clean killing" received a boost from the U.S. in 1890. At the time, America was enthralled by electricity. Some of the country's best minds believed that the new technology would show the way to what electrocution enthusiast Alfred Southwick called the "more humane [execution that] science and civilization demand." What Southwick and his colleagues created was the electric chair, a uniquely American tool of justice.

In the last 111 years, more Americans have died by legal electrocution - 4,324 - than through any other method of execution. Indeed, the chair has killed nearly as many Americans as did combat in the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined. It served as the setting for the final act of such dramatic cases as those of Sacco and Vanzetti, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and Ted Bundy.

But the long era of the electric chair is drawing to a close, and Bernstein is one of the hands that is pulling its plug.

Bernstein is, perhaps, the world's only scientific expert on the chair. "Few people with a technical background have really studied it," he says. And that, as he sees it, is the biggest problem with the chair. Legal electrocution has always been the province of people with little or no training in biomedical engineer- ing. Bernstein has spent the last three decades stripping away the chair's scientific veneer to expose the ignorance underlying its operation.

Bernstein, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, didn't set out to study the chair - or execution in any form - when he launched his academic career. His research at UW-Madison focused on magnetics and solid-state devices. But in the mid-1960s, his department head left an article about preventing accidental electrocution on his desk. Bernstein was hooked. For the next thirty years, he would study the effects of electricity on the body - applied both by mistake and deliberately.

"From a purely historical point of view," he says, "it's a fascinating subject - as long as you don't think too much about the people being killed."

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