On May 22, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law a bill that will allow the state to use the elec­tric chair in exe­cu­tions if lethal injec­tion drugs are not avail­able. While sev­en states, includ­ing Tennessee, allow inmates to choose the elec­tric chair as their method of exe­cu­tion, no oth­er state forces inmates to be exe­cut­ed by that method. Defense attor­ney David Raybin, who helped draft Tennessee’s death penal­ty law in the 1970s, said that chang­ing the exe­cu­tion method retroac­tive­ly would be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Inmates might also raise chal­lenges to elec­tro­cu­tion under the Eighth Amendment ban on cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. Executions by elec­tric chair have result­ed in inmates bleed­ing and catch­ing fire, and some have required mul­ti­ple jolts of elec­tric­i­ty before death occurred. Since 1976, 158 peo­ple have been exe­cut­ed by the elec­tric chair. The last use of the elec­tric chair in Tennessee was in 2007, when Daryl Holton chose elec­tro­cu­tion over lethal injec­tion. Read the text of the bill here.

(“Tennessee ready to bring back elec­tric chair,” Associated Press, May 23, 2014.) See Methods of Execution and Recent Legislation.

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