St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1890-08-10
ELECTRICAL ROASTING.

The horrible bungle they made OF
KEM,ILER'S execution settles the fate OF
electricity for some time to come as an
official death dealer. The gallows has
had its day as an instrument of torture.
and the anxiety to find some less re-
pulsiye way of inflicting capital punish
ment led to the suggestion that cleo
tricity be experimental with. Various
propositions were submitted to the diff
ferent state legislatures looking to the
introduction of electrical execution, but
nowhere did these propositions receive
favorable consideration until the New
York assembly took it up. A commits
sion was appointed by that body to IN
vestigate the subject, and upon the rec
concentration of that commission the law
was framed under which KEAINILER was
executed. Prior to the time fixed FOR
executing KEMMLER there had been
revulsion of popular sentiment and all
technical points were strained, but
without avail, to save the poor victim OF
the laws brutality.
Whether or not KEMMLER'S eXecu-
ton could have been made more OF
success is question hardly worth de-
batting. The eminent doctors and
electricians who attended the exc
cution are quarreling among themselves
Ill regard to the matter. There is a
good deal of elimination and recrlmlna-
ton. which sheds no new light on the
efficiency of electricity as death in
strument. But their quarreling is use
less, for the botch that was made OF
this Job has created a popular prejudice
against the use of electricity in such
cases which the progress OF science
cannot overcome during this genera
ton. Instead of producing painless
and instantaneous death in KEMMLER'S
case, as had been predicted by the cleo
tricjans, the death agony was prolonged
fully as great time as is done by the
choking process of the gallows. 10
most persons death by sutfocation is
preferable to being roasted alive.
The failure of electricity as an in
strument of execution does not remove
the repulsive features of the galloWs.
That is still as Objectionable as ever.
1t is a brutal way of killing criminal,
to say the the least of it. Those who be-
ieve that capital punishment is neces-
sary as a deterrent to crime-and
majority of people do hold such bellef
still insist that some more humane
method than hanging must be adopted.
OF all the inventions that have yet
been discovered, there is nothing equal
to the guillotine, Notwithstanding the
prejudice against it because OF the
bloody part it played in the French
revolution. The old fashion of chop
ping the head off with an ak was
more civilized procedure than the gal
lows execution. When the head is
severed at one blow the death agony can
only be momentary. The advantage the
guillotine has over the ak and block
method is that it's work is performed
mechanically, and consequently more
apt to be swift and sure. The
axman's nerve may weaken, or his
arm may not be true. But there is
mathematical precision in the work OF
the guillotine. 1t is true there is mu,
tilation of the body, as there is in cleo
trical roasting, but the victim is not con-
SciOuS of it.
From its association with the bloodiest
period of French history, the guillotine
is not apt to growinto popularity in this
country, so that some new device for
killing criminals will have to be in
| vented. But in the name OF humanity
and of our progressive civilization, let
us try to find something better than the
! gibbet.