Free Republic

The state Supreme Court on Friday rejected an inmate's appeal that the electric chair amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, leaving Nebraska as still the only state with electrocution as its sole means of execution. No American court has ever ruled that electrocution amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. But as legal challenges were mounted against its use, others states adopted alternative methods of execution, primarily lethal injection. "Nebraska ... now is alone in the United States, actually in the whole world, in still requiring electrocution," Carey Dean Moore's lawyer, Alan Peterson, argued to the court. "Nebraska is the last...

A convicted killer who chose the electric chair because he was apparently unnerved by the prospect of lethal injection awaited execution Thursday. Brandon Hedrick, 27, was set to become the first person executed in the electric chair in the United States in more than two years. He was condemned to die for the 1997 murder of 23-year-old Lisa Crider, who was abducted, robbed, raped and killed with a shotgun blast to the face. Virginia's Death Row inmates are given the option of dying by injection or electrocution. Three other Virginia inmates have opted for the electric chair over injection since...

HUNTSVILLE -- Although it was built in the 20th century, the most infamous exhibit in the Texas Prison Museum could be a relic from the Dark Ages: a tall, high-backed, austere, solid oak chair, fitted with leather shackles, like some kind of dungeon throne. Washed in a spotlight's eerie glow, it appears almost medieval. The high-voltage killing machine was the end of the line for dead men walking. From 1924 to 1964, the Texas chair snuffed 361 lives. The electric chair is fading into obsolescence, a dying form of dying in America. It's an optional form of execution in four...