Free Republic

Attorneys for a Tennessee death row prisoner were trying to spare him from lethal injection and they succeeded — but not the way they hoped. Instead of getting the needle, Edmund Zagorski is scheduled to die in the electric chair on Nov. 1. If the execution goes forward, he will be only the second person to be executed that way in Tennessee since 1960. His case illustrates how hard it is for states to find ways to execute prisoners that courts will deem humane; the challenge attorneys face trying to save their clients from execution; and the frustration of some...

Tennessee has decided to bring back the electric chair. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam on Thursday signed a bill into law allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event the state is unable to obtain drugs used for lethal injections. […] Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said Tennessee is the first state to enact a law to reintroduce the electric chair without giving prisoners an option. …

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- An electric chair slated to be used in the state's first execution by electrocution since 1960 was tested Monday and is ready to go, prison officials said. The chair, scheduled to be used in the execution of convicted killer Daryl Holton early Wednesday, was tested by running currents through a "test load box that is designed to simulate a human body," said state Department of Correction spokeswoman Dorinda Carter. The test lasts about 35 seconds -- "the amount of time we believe it takes to cause death at 1,750 volts," she said. Holton, a Gulf War...

Saddam Hussein has told his lawyers that he wants to be shot by firing squad, not hanged, if sentenced to death during his murder trial, which resumes later this month in Baghdad. Saddam maintains that he is still commander in chief of Iraq's armed forces -- and that a firing squad is "the right way" to execute a military leader. "I'm not afraid of death," he told two of his lawyers in an astonishingly candid five-hour meeting, as he sat in a comfortable chair at the head of the table. "Of course I'm not guilty, but I know they want...

GERING, Neb. - Jeffrey Hessler asked Monday for the death penalty, and three judges quickly obliged. Click to Enlarge Jeffrey Hessler Less than six hours after Hessler said that he deserved to die for the February 2003 abduction, rape and murder of a 15-year-old Gering newspaper carrier, a three-judge panel issued that sentence. Hessler, 26, a former airport security screener, provided no arguments for a sentence of life in prison. In a rambling nine-page written statement he provided to the judges Monday, Hessler said he would fight even the required automatic appeal of his death sentence. "I, Jeffrey Alan Hessler,...

MIDI - DANCING IN THE DARK If you commit mass murder...and you're found in your spider hole You have a legal problem...to not be hung, that should be your goal As your trial gets closer...Mark Geragos no longer looks good You get worried...yes, we really think that you should There's one gun for hire...this guy knocks it right out of the park If things are dire...it is time that you call up Ramsey Clark Ramsey loathes his own country..he has proven that every time Of course, he worked for Johnson...the two of them are not worth one dime As...