Updated when available. A swift and painless death is a mercy that few of us will be granted. Disease and aging do not often complete their lethal work without laying down lengthy and devastating barrages. But of all trauma victims, the murdered are most likely to end their lives in some form of agony. And so, some find it paradoxical that when murderers are to be executed, our society often tries to provide them with the painless death that only a small number of us will have been granted by nature or fortune.
Electrocution is the only method of capital punishment in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Nebraska.
If the court decides that murderers deserve a quietus of which they have deprived others, then the electric chair should unquestionably be abolished. Even when it functions as it should, the electric chair is a brutal killer. It depends on three jolts of electricity - some 2,000 volts each, traveling from head to foot for anywhere from 8 seconds to 20 seconds. Technical failures in any part of this complex apparatus can result in a failure of the entire system. Ideally, passage of current through the head and into the trunk should instantly cause unconsciousness, although it simultaneously stimulates acute contractions of virtually every muscle in the body.