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This undated photo, published by the Tennessee Department of Corrections, shows death row inmate Edmund Zagorski in Tennessee. (Tennessee Department of Corrections via AP)
"Let's see rock," he said from a mortuary chamber at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
These were Edmund Zagorski's last words before the jolts of electric current that ran through his body. His hands remained clenched, with the exception of his little fingers. They were either dislocated or broken, his lawyer would to say later, after straining the straps of the electric chair in which Zagorski, 63, died Thursday at 19:26. local hour.
The state killed the double murderer by electrocution, rejecting a lethal injection at his request. His death makes him the first in five years to perish in an electric chair – and only the second in Tennessee since 1960. Daryl Holton, a Gulf War veteran who killed his four children in a marital conflict, has opted for the electric chair in 2007.
Tennessee is one of the few states where the electric chair is still an option for executions. Prisoners who committed their crimes prior to 1999 may choose to die by electric tension rather than by a cocktail of drugs. At the same time, 30 states allow some form of capital punishment. One of them is Pennsylvania, where federal prosecutors have begun the process of seeking a possible death sentence against Robert Bowers, accused of shooting 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, if he were to be convicted for some charges.
Zagorski was convicted in 1984 of first-degree murder with premeditation for having lured two men into a wooded area under the guise of a marijuana deal, then shot them and slit their throats.
In a legal battle that reached the US Supreme Court last month, Zagorski sought to escape the death penalty on the basis of the prohibition of the "Cruel and Unusual Amendment" in the Eighth Amendment. a repudiation of a method considered by some as more humane and more technologically advanced, despite a series of problems and concerns emanating from medical experts.
"By signing this affidavit, I do not concede that electrocution is constitutional. I believe the lethal injection and the electrocution violate my rights under the eighth amendment, "wrote Zagorski last month. "However, if I'm not granted a stay of execution by the courts, between two unconstitutional choices, I choose electrocution."
He felt that death at the end of a syringe could mean up to 18 minutes of "terror and total agony," while the electric chair would quickly stop his heart.
At first, the state rejected his request, claiming that his request had arrived too late. However, after a federal judge suspended execution, officials reversed the trend. Governor, Republican Bill Haslam, ordered a 10-day delay to prepare for the use of the electric chair. The state confirmed that it would execute Zagorski's death sentence by electrocution, "on the basis of the waiver of his right to be executed by lethal injection," the prison director wrote to the detainee's attorney last month. .
However, his quest to assert the right not to be executed at all failed. On Thursday again, the US Supreme Court declined to consider the case, after a majority of judges had decided last month not to thwart the execution. They did not motivate their determination, as is customary. But Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a harsh critic of the death penalty, has dissociated herself from the ordinance of October. Judge Stephen G. Breyer is joined to it.
"Once again, a state is eager to kill a prisoner despite the growing evidence that midazolam, the sedative to be used" will induce feelings of "drowning, choking, and death." 39, be burned alive from the inside ". Midazolam, the powerful sedative, first introduced in a three-drug protocol, proved so difficult that a prisoner sentenced to death in Alabama last year asked to be killed by a rifle platoon.
Sotomayor said: "Prisoners in the capital are not entitled to a pleasant death under the eighth amendment, but they are entitled to a humane death. The more we remain silent in the face of growing evidence of inhumanity in methods of execution like that of Tennessee, the more we extend our own complicity in state-sponsored brutality. "
His reasoning contrasted with last month's Tennessee Supreme Court decision, which decided 4-1 to reconsider an appeal against the lethal injection of 32 death row inmates, saying the drug had tortured to death. The inmates did not prove that another way was available, found the majority.
One of them was Zagorski. The legal filings indicate that within two hours of the court's decision, he informed the prison director that he wanted an alternative: the electric wheelchair.
He spent 34 years on death row, becoming a "model inmate," according to his lawyer, Kelley Henry, a federal public defender. She said that he had once saved the life of a guard. The last time he was under surveillance, the other inmates pooled their resources for a pizza dinner in his honor, according to the Tennessean.
On Thursday, his last meal was marinated pork knuckles and pig tails, the Tennessee Correction Department announced. Inmates in Tennessee receive $ 20 for a special meal before their execution. He ate at 4 pm, three hours before being sponged with salt water to better conduct electricity.
"Raise your head," he told his lawyer in his last moments, telling him that he did not want to look out and see his expression slaughtered.
She condemned her death as a miscarriage of justice, saying, "The world is not safer because of its execution."
"Horribly, Mr. Zagorski was forced to choose between 10 to 18 minutes of chemical burning from the inside while he was paralyzed or literally burned to death in less than a minute," he said. she told the press.
In this archive photo from October 13, 1999, Ricky Bell, then custodian of the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, makes a tour of the prison's execution hall. (AP Photo / Mark Humphrey, File)
The irony of the case, said Bernard Harcourt, an expert in criminal law and criminal procedure at Columbia University, is that lethal injection, considered a method worthy of modern times, has muted our consideration. by the society of the unavowable character of the. "
Texas became the first state to use lethal injection to apply the death penalty in 1982. Since then, more than 7% of lethal injections have been botched, said Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College and author from "Horrible Shows: Missed Executions and Death Penalty in America. "
"The lethal injection was supposed to be the embodiment of a century-old quest for a method of execution that can be safe, reliable and humane," he said at the time. ;an interview. "But with every invention of a technology – electrocution replacing the hanging, the gas chamber becoming a complement to the electrocution, then in the late 1970s, the development of the protocol for electrocution. lethal injection – the same hopes were expressed. "
The prisoner's decision to return to an older method of punishment, Sarat said, "indicates what we know to be happening – the breakdown of the idea that a lethal injection would be a kind of quick fix."
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