Tennessee double murderer Edmund Zagorski asks for the execution of an electric wheelchair following a lethal injection

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – A Tennessee detainee scheduled to be executed this week is asking the state to die in an electric wheelchair during a lethal injection, calling the move "the lesser of two evils".

Lawyer Kelley Henry confirmed Monday that Edmund Zagorski had made this request about two hours before the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol was constitutional. The decision paved the way for Zagorski's performance Thursday.

"Faced with the choice of two unconstitutional methods of execution, Mr. Zagorski said that if his execution was to advance, he felt that the electric chair was the lesser of the two evils," Henry said in a statement. "10-18 minutes of drowning, choking and chemical burning are untold."

A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Correctional Services Department did not immediately return a request for comment Monday night.

In Tennessee, death row convicts whose offenses were committed before January 1999 may choose the electric chair or the lethal injection. The last time Tennessee put somebody to death by electric chair, it was in 2007.

Zagorski was sentenced in 1984 following the deaths of two men during a drug-related transaction. Prosecutors said Zagorski shot dead John Dotson and Jimmy Porter, then threw their throats after stealing them in Robertson County in April 1983. The victims had planned to buy marijuana in Zagorski.

Dotson's wife told WTVF-TV, a subsidiary of CBS in Nashville, that her murder still haunts her every day. She hopes that she will get a close after the execution of Zagorski.

"I've been doing this for 35 years and will be happy when it's over," said Marsha Dotson. "I'm just tired, you know, I'm mentally tired, I'm physically tired, I'm just ready for it to be over so I can start healing somehow."

In addition to the request for an electric wheelchair, Henry is seeking a stay of execution of Zagorski to give the US Supreme Court time to re-examine the case. The Zagorski legal team asserted that the method of execution chosen by the state violated the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment imposed by the 8th amendment.

The majority opinion of the court found that the inmates failed to establish the protocol of the three drugs was unconstitutional because they had not proved that there was a readily available alternative method that was more humane, a requirement of current federal and Tennessee legislation.

Judge Sharon Lee, dissenting from the majority opinion, wrote that on such an important issue, detainees had the right to be heard at trial without regard to "the constitutionality of the law." other lethal injection protocols that the state does not plan to use ".

Henry argued at a hearing before the Supreme Court of Tennessee last week that a single dose of pentobarbital barbiturate would be a more humane form of execution. State lawyers said that they had not been able to procure this drug, which had become largely inaccessible to executions as a result of a public outcry over its use for this purpose several years ago.

In August, Tennessee executed its first inmate in nearly a decade. The United States Supreme Court refused to stay the execution.

Governor Bill Haslam has already stated that he would not intervene in the case of Zagorski.

Tennessee is one of only nine states to allow electrocutions, and only 14 of the 871 inmates executed in the United States since 2000 have been killed in an electric wheelchair, according to the death penalty information center. . The latest electrocution in the United States occurred in Virginia in January 2013.