Tennessee officials refuse request for electric wheelchair by death row prisoner

If the murderer Edmund George Zagorski had been sentenced, he would die near the electric chair instead of the cocktail of drugs that the Tennessee Prison officials intend to administer on Thursday.

Zagorski, an inmate of the Riverbend Maximum Security facility in Nashville, said he preferred the electrocution because he "does not want to be subjected to torture by the lethal injection method "according to an affidavit that he sent to the prison authorities on Monday.

In Tennessee, death row prisoners convicted before January 1999 have the choice between a lethal injection and an electric chair. If the inmate does not make a decision, the default treatment is a lethal injection.

Nevertheless, prison officials rejected Zagorski's request this week, saying he had waited too long to make his decision, according to the Tennessean.

In a statement to USA Today, the Tennessee Department of Corrections said that death row inmates must apply to the president for two full weeks before the date of execution. (The ministry refused to offer an additional comment to HuffPost.)

Federal Public Defender Kelley Henry, Zagorski's attorney, told the Associated Press that Zagorski had asked for the electric wheelchair about two hours before the Tennessee Supreme Court's decision to declare constitutional the protocol of 39, lethal injection to three drugs of the state. This decision paved the way for Zagorski's performance on Thursday, AP reported.

"Mr. Zagorski said that if his execution was to go ahead, he thought the electric wheelchair was the least of the two evils," said Henry in a statement obtained by AP.

Zagorski, 63, has been on death row for 34 years.

According to court records, he was 28 in April 1983 when he took two men to a wooded area in Robertson County, Tennessee, under the pretext of a drug-related transaction. Zagorski slaughtered both men, slit their throats and took thousands of dollars in cash, authorities said.

Prior to his capture, Zagorski, armed and dressed in a bulletproof vest, participated in a shootout with law enforcement officers in Ohio. During the May 1983 incident, he struck a police car and fired at a police officer five times. The officer miraculously survived.

When the Tennessee case was tried in 1984, Zagorski was convicted of first degree premeditated murder. According to the court documents, the jury recommended the death penalty on the basis of two aggravating circumstances: the murders were "heinous, atrocious or cruel" and they were committed during the robbery.

Tennessee is one of only nine states still allowing electrocutions, but the method is no longer used since 2007, the year of the execution of Daryl Holton for a quadruple homicide.

Reverend Joe Ingle, Minister of the United Church of Christ and Zagorski's spiritual advisor, told Tennessean that Zagorski had chosen the electric chair, in part because of reports of Billy Ray Irick's suffering during his injection fatal on August 9th.

"I think the guys had the impression that Billy Irick had suffered a lot and nobody wanted to go through that," Ingle said. "Even if the electric chair is bad and that's pretty serious, it's not that."

Intravenous death can be extremely time consuming, depending on the state of the injection and the specific drugs used.

On January 16, 2017, Ohio executed by lethal injection the convicted rapist and murderer Dennis McGuire and it took him 25 minutes to die – about double the average time for similar executions.

In April 2014, inmate Clayton Lockett, of Oklahoma, was declared dead 45 minutes after the start of his execution. Due to procedural complications, Lockett is twisted on the cart and the area around his injection site has ballooned to the size of a golf ball.

It took a prisoner from Ohio, Joseph Lewis Clark, executed by lethal injection in 2006, 86 minutes to die.

Zagorski is among 31 death row inmates who have sued to prevent Tennessee from using a controversial drug cocktail during executions. Experts say the drugs would cause such intense pain that it would be a cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the US Constitution.

The state high court ruled against them, saying they had not suggested a cocktail of feasible replacement drugs.

As for the execution of Zagorski, Tennessee's governor, Bill Haslam, a Republican, said he would grant no pardon, reported the WTVF newspaper in Nashville.

Henry now hopes that the US Supreme Court will grant a stay at the last minute.

"The protocol of three state drugs is a definite torture," she wrote in a public statement, according to the Tennessean. "Mr. Zagorski's lungs would fill with fluid as the mucous membrane is burned by the acid, it would be paralyzed, then burned alive chemically from the inside, without pain relief, Mr. Zagorski should bear this extreme suffering for 10 to 18 minutes. "

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