Tennessee brings back electric chair

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee has decided how it will respond to a nationwide scarcity of lethal injection drugs for death-row inmates: with the electric chair.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill into law Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates in the event prisons are unable to obtain the drugs, which have become more and more scarce following a European-led boycott of drug sales for executions.



Tennessee lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the electric chair legislation in April, with the Senate voting 23-3 and the House 68-13 in favor of the bill. Tennessee is the first state to enact a law to reintroduce the electric chair without giving prisoners an option, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that opposes executions and tracks the issue.

"There are states that allow inmates to choose, but it is a very different matter for a state to impose a method like electrocution," he said. "No other state has gone so far." Dieter said he expects legal challenges to arise if the state decides to go through with an electrocution, both on the grounds of whether the state could prove that lethal injection drugs were not obtainable and on the grounds of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

A Haslam spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press that the governor had signed the measure Thursday evening, but offered no further comment. Republican state Sen. Ken Yager, a main sponsor of the electric chair measure, said in a recent interview that he introduced the bill because of "a real concern that we could find ourselves in a position that if the chemicals were unavailable to us that we would not be able to carry out the sentence."

The decision comes as lethal injection is receiving more scrutiny as an execution method, especially after last month's botched execution in Oklahoma. In that case, convicted killer Clayton Lockett, 38, began writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow after he had supposedly been rendered unconscious by the first of three drugs in the state's new lethal injection combination.

And we're gonna build a fire fire fire fire, fire fire fire, and we're gonna let 'em burn burn burn burn, burn burn burn



Personally, I think they should have a special little attachment as a precursor strapped to the "boys" to let them know what's comin.

"Cruel and unusual punishment" seems an ironic and idiot statement when we're talking about perverted, sadistic, condemned torturers and murders.....

that ought to cause some sparks to fly.

Irony at it's best.
People dying of drug overdoses everyday ( street and prescription drugs).
And the state can't get enough for it's executions.

Personally, I think a firing squad would be cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable.

That's what they say.

It's easier than ripping off the heads of zombies.