The Switch

By John Allen

At least with an ax, the executioners would have known exactly how they were killing Kemmler. With electricity, they were ignorant. And according to Bernstein, those who employ electrocution today know little more about the way it causes death than did the device's creators.

Edison, Southwick, and other electrocution backers had been convinced by anecdotal reports and a few tests on animals that victims died immediately and painlessly. Theories abounded as to how: perhaps electricity disturbed atomic equilibrium, or demagnetized the blood, or constricted the arteries, or overwhelmed the brain. But most authorities at the time agreed with Edison's claim that somehow electricity destroyed the nervous system, and thus victims could feel nothing as they died.

Variations on this view are still widely held. In March, as a Georgia court was deciding whether electrocution is cruel and unusual, forensic pathologist Ronald Wright testified that electrical current "causes the nerves inside the head to depolarize" and that death occurs from "just heating up the brain."

That, at least, is the plan. In practice, according to Bernstein, death by electricity is hardly so clean or quick.

"You hear people talk about electrocution frying the brain," he says. "That's a lot of nonsense. The skull has a very high resistance, and current tends to flow around it." Instead, the effects of electrical current usually have a greater effect on the heart - and so electrocution generally kills through cardiac arrest.

Is such a death painless? Bernstein has his doubts. "They say it must be painless, because, after all, people who die in the chair never cry out. But then, when people are strapped into the chair, they're always bound and gagged with a hood over their head, so they can't possibly cry out." But he's careful to limit his opinions to his area of authority: the physics of electricity. "I'm just an engineer," he says.

In engineering terms, the electric chair is a relatively simple circuit, with current flowing between the two terminals of the generator and passing, on the way, through a single resistor - a human body hooked in by electrodes on the head and one leg. An average human body, says Bernstein, has a resistance of about 300 ohms, though this can vary based on the victim's weight. ("It's all about cross section," he says. In a narrow body, the electrical current is more concentrated and has more effect on the tissues it passes through. In a wider body, it will be more diffuse. ) The chair's generator builds up a certain voltage, the executioner throws a switch, and current passes through the body: voltage divided by resistance equals current, measured in amperes.

It's that number of amperes that is the key in determining how (or whether) the electricity will kill its victim. If the current is too low - say, half an ampere - it may not kill the victim, but will give a painful shock and may cause muscles to seize up. Very high currents - say five or six amperes - will send the victim's heart into asystole: it will just stop. And if the current is somewhere in between, the victim's heart will go into ventricular fibrillation. "It won't beat," says Bernstein, "but instead will quiver like a bag full of worms."

Each individual reacts to electricity differently, and so the level of current necessary to cause fibrillation and asystole is difficult to define exactly. Either condition can kill, but neither is immediate - and the way that states operate their chairs, neither is a sure thing.

Take, for example, electrocutions in Alabama. Although each state that uses an electric chair has its own unique protocols - each employing different voltages and different cycles of high- and low-current shocks - Alabama's chair, known because of its color as the Yellow Mama, is fairly typical. First it shocks its victim for twenty-two seconds at between 1,800 and 1,900 volts, then drops for twelve seconds to between 700 and 800 volts, and finishes with a five-second burst back at 1,800 volts. If the condemned has an average, 300-ohm body, he or she would sustain a current of about six amperes, followed by a lower current of about two amperes, and a final jolt at six.

Executioners "start with a high current," says Bernstein, "because they think they'll zap 'em good. This will send a person's heart into asystole, but the trouble with asystole is that the heart may spontaneously restart as soon as the current is removed."

The low-current shock that follows may cause the victim's heart to fibrillate. Unlike asystole, a heart won't spontaneously recover from fibrillation. According to Bernstein, most electrical deaths, whether legal or accidental, result from this condition. Nothing will reverse fibrillation and restore the heart's natural beat except the application of a high-energy electrical shock, as from a defibrillator - or possibly from the Yellow Mama's final, high-current jolt.

"They think they're giving the coup de grace," says Bernstein, "but instead they may be reviving the victim."

If the chair is so unreliable, how does Bernstein explain its perfect record, not just in Alabama but all over the U.S.: 4,324 attempts, 4,324 dead bodies? (Not even Willie Francis - see sidebar - could beat electrocution forever.) The answer is that executioners continue to reapply current until the condemned person is dead. "You give enough shocks," says Bernstein, "you can kill anybody."

But the repeated application of current often leads to messy executions. Of the 149 electrocutions performed in the last twenty-five years, the Death Penalty Information Center lists ten of them as "botched." Five of the condemned were shocked to such an extent that witnesses observed smoke or flames.

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