Zagorski's last words before being executed: "Let's rock".

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – Tennessee has used its electric chair for the first time since 2007, running a detainee on Thursday night for the murder of two other men shot and slaughtered during a drug deal several decades ago.

According to the authorities, detainee Edmund Zagorski, 63, was pronounced dead at 19:26. Thursday in a maximum security prison in Nashville. When asked if he had one last word to say, he replied, "Let's get right to rock" shortly before the performance. Journalists who attended the scene then said at a press briefing that he alternated between grinning smile and smile while a sponge was resting on his head and then a shroud on the head. They said that his fist was clenched when the tension worked and that he did not move once the electricity stopped flowing.

By choosing the electric chair rather than a lethal injection as Tennessee allowed him, Zagorski said it would be a quicker and less painful way to die. He became the only second person to die in the Tennessee electric wheelchair since 1960. Nationally, only 14 other people have been put to death in an electric wheelchair since 2000, including a Virginia detainee in 2013 .

The execution came shortly after the US Supreme Court dismissed the prisoner's request for suspension on Thursday night. The lawyers argued that it was unconstitutional to force him to choose between the electric chair and the lethal injection.

The state nearly injected the 63-year-old inmate with chemicals three weeks ago, a plan that was made by the governor of Tennessee when Zagorski exercised his right to ask for the electric chair.

The Supreme Court, in a statement Thursday evening, said that Judge Sonia Sotomayor was the dissenting voice, noting Zagorski's decision to opt for the electric chair.

"He did not do it because he thought it was a humane way of dying, but because he thought the three-drug cocktail that Tennessee had planned for Using it was even worse, "said Sotomayor in a statement. "Given what most people think of the electric chair, it's hard to imagine a more striking testament – of a person more at stake – than the legitimate fears aroused by the lethal injecting drugs that Tennessee uses."

Zagorski was convicted of the murders committed in April 1983 by two men during a drug-related transaction. Prosecutors said that Zagorski had shot John Dotson and Jimmy Porter, then slit their throats after stealing the two men after asking them to buy marijuana.

In Tennessee, convicted prisoners whose crimes were committed prior to 1999 may choose the electric chair – one of six states that allow such a choice.

The Supreme Court never ruled on whether the use of the electric chair violated the prohibition of the cruel and unusual punishment contained in the 8th Amendment, but she approached about 20 years ago after a series of failed electrocutions in Florida. During the two executions in the 1990s, detainees were smoked and flames fired. In 1999, blood flowed under the mask of an inmate. Shortly after, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge of the electric chair. But the case was dropped when Florida made the lethal injection its main mode of execution.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam refused to intervene in Zagorski's case, despite pleas by former jurors who sentenced the prisoner, the correctional officers and the Zagorski priest. An application for commutation of Zagorski's sentence to life imprisonment indicated that Zagorski was an "exemplary" detainee who had never committed a disciplinary offense.

At the time of Zagorski's conviction, Tennessee jurors did not have the opportunity to consider life without parole. Each state now requires juries to evaluate this option in death penalty cases.

The Tennessee electric chair was inspected on October 10 and was found to meet the criteria for performance, according to official documents.

The device was rebuilt in the late 1980s by a self-taught expert who feared a malfunction on Thursday. It has only been used to execute one person before: Daryl Holton, in 2007.

Before Holton, William Tines in 1960 was the last person to die in the Tennessee electric wheelchair.

Zagorski has been on death row for 34 years, the second since Tennessee.

Groups opposed to Tennessee's enforcement projects have organized evening vigils in cities like Nashville, Knoxville and Memphis.