Edmund Zagorski wants to die by electric chair

"Mr. Zagorski has said that if he is performing, he believes that the electric chair is the lesser of two evils," public defender Kelley Henry said in an email Monday night. "We hereby report the decision of the Tennessee Supreme Court decision."

Explaining the decision, when the doctors said that they would be drowning and burning alive at the same time: "Ten to 18 minutes of drowning, suffocation and chemical burning is unspeakable. "

more: Tennessee Supreme Court rules executions can proceed

'I have no idea how fast they could do it'

State law permits the death of a person before death.

Tennessee last used the electric chair in 2007, when death row inmate Daryl Holton was executed. Holton was convicted of killing his three sons and a stepdaughter in 1997.

The electric chair: Tennessee could be the first state to use it since 2013

Holton's attorney David Raybin said Holton thing the electric chair "weeks if not months" before his execution. Raybin said it would be a lot of work to prepare the Department of Correctional Staff for that method of execution.

"The protocol for the electrocution is clearly different," Raybin said. "They have to train the execution team to go through that.

"I had no idea how fast they could do it."

Tennessee Department of Correction spokeswoman Neysa Taylor said Monday night she was not aware of Zagorski's decision and would not know if the electric chair would be used.

Raybin, who helped write Tennessee's death penalty statute as a prosecutor in 1976, said Zagorski's decision, just before he was scheduled to die, sounded legal because it was connected to the final decision in his lethal injection challenge. State law does not set a deadline for making choices.

"Because it's tied directly to the timing of the (Tennessee) Supreme Court I would not think the state would be justifiably argues that it would wait too long," Raybin said.

"It's an interesting legal move but I think it makes a statement," Raybin said. "It is designed to be better, but it's not."

Zagorski opts for electric chair to avoid 'torture'

Henry provided a copy of the Zagorski affidavit signed Monday, in which he stated that, while he believes that both injection and the electric chair are unconstitutional, "between two unconstitutional choices I choose electrocution."

"I do not want to be subjected to the torture of the current lethal injection method," Zagorski said.

He said he would continue fighting to stop or delay his execution.

Gov. Bill Haslam on Friday refused to commute the Zagorski's sentence. His legal team plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene this week.

Zagorski was convicted in 1984 of killing two men in Robertson County. He shot them, slit their throats and robbed them after luring them into the woods by promising to sell them to large amounts of marijuana, according to Tennessean archives.

This is a developing story.