← It Could Happen Here
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
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America, y' all better wake the hell up.
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Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
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Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
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Hey, I'm Kyle McLaughlin. You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex and the City or just the Internet Stand. I have a new podcast called what Are We Even Doing? Where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brillian chaos of youth culture. Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me to talk about navigating this high speed roller coaster we call reality. Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what Are We Even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Rich Russians Falling out of Windows podcast is back. Sad Oligarch Season 2 Since we left you in 23 after season one, many politically motivated Russian millionaires have continued to die in suspicious circumstances. Season two gets very weird. Listen to Sad Oligarch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu Every single episode.
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32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.
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What?
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Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper.
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Listen to season four of SNAFU with.
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Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media A warning. This episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing.
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I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and the co author with longtime journalist Betsy Freeh, of a history of eugenics in Texas called the Purifying Knife.
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And I'm Steven Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas. He specializes covering political extremism and far right Internet culture for publications like the Texas Observ, the Barbed Wire and others.
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On December 7, 1982, the State of Texas Made history in a particularly grim way. It became the first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to make the grisly business of executing murderers swift and humane.
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More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions, and by extension, the general public, that what they were watching didn't violate the United States Constitution's eighth amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is based on junk science, and those who die that way may actually suffer more and over a longer time than prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago.
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In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed to hide from the public that their government is torturing prisoners to death. As University of Richmond law professor Corinna Lane, the author of recently published book Secrets of the Killing, the Untold Story of Lethal injection, told us, what I've.
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Come to conclude is that lethal injection only does one thing well, only one, and that is it hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence of the death penalty of what state killing actually is. And I remember reading it's not in the book. I kind of wish I had put it in there, But I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctantly.
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Over the next three episodes of it could happen Here, we're going to examine the shady business of state killing. We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and the unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about the untrained personnel who carry out the executions and how pressure from drug companies who didn't want their product associated with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally.
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We'll also talk about the pain the condemned suffer and speak with people who have accompanied those sentenced to death in their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood, who, as of this broadcast, has been the last friend of 10 men. And as they died by state command.
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It'S incredibly strange to see someone hooked.
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Up to machines that look like they're there to support life, and yet you know that they're there to take his life. We'll tell the story of one heroic Texas man, Ray Spujon, who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime, but fought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker, who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September 11th in 2001 and committed two Dallas area murders in a shooting spree. Well, definitely this execution was not for the victims because the victims and the victims family members requested and also fought for clemency. We went ahead and requested the governor of Texas, the Board of Burdens and Paroles that do not execute him in our names show Marcy, but looks like we are not in the same page. The system wanted to move forward so it was not in our names. It was basically just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running, sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution is actually going to help the society, how it is going to help people.
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Finally, we'll look at the future of the death penalty, which has become increasingly unpopular with the public even as politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers of the chemicals used in the lethal injection.
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This is the story of the One As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants.
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To floor scrubbers, all so that he.
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Can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused.
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Call 1-800-granger.
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Click granger.com or just stop by Granger.
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For the ones who get it done.
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All I know is what I've been told and that's a half truth is a whole lie.
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For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
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I'm telling you we know Quincy killed her.
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We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
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Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
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My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
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I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.
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That y' all said.
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They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured.
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Gas on her.
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From Lava For Good this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order order to find someone.
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To blame America, y' all better wake the hell up.
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Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
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Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
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Welcome fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Kultura Podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.
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The founders of the British colonies that became the United States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital punishment prevalent in 16th and 17th century Europe. There, royal executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them limb from limb, sawing them in half and beheading them. Such elaborate executions were meant to underscore the absolute power of monarchs. As the political scientist Austin Surratt noted in his book Gruesome Spectacles, Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, capital punishment was precisely about the right of the state to kill as it pleased. Live, but live by the grace of the sovereign. Live, but remember that your life belongs to the state.
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However, even before the American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less exotic forms of capital punishment. In 1608, authorities in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being a spy for the Spanish Empire. That was the first execution in the British colonies in North America that later became part of the United States. Inspired by the Old Testament legal code, the 13 British colonies put prisoners to death for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing food or horses, killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, sodomy, adultery, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, insurrection, treason, manslaughter, and of course, murder.
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Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel European monarchs, in 1789, the first Congress of the United States submitted to the states the 8th amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned, quote, cruel and unusual punishments. The required number of states ratified the amendment in 1791. From colonial times until the first use of the electric chair in New York in 1890, condemned prisoners in the United States usually died at the end of a hangman's rope. More than half of the estimated 16,000 executions in all of US history have been by hanging. Hanging was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance, skinning prisoners alive.
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As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments of fit the crimes and that no one was executed for relatively minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in 1794, several states such as Vermont, Maryland and New Hampshire sharply reduced the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty. Perhaps not surprisingly, the south went in the opposite direction.
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There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved African Americans. They bought, sold, raped, whipped and relentlessly forced to work without pay. Whites reported laying sleepless at night, imagining what might happen if they faced justice for their crimes. They wanted the African Americans they so abused to fear the consequences of any form of resistance.
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After repeated failed rebellions from 1704 to 1831, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw the death of many if not all slave owners in Haiti, legislators in the south greatly expanded the range of offenses for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition. In Europe, enslaved men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to escape their captivity faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons. This legacy of violence in the south contributed to the region's long term love affair with capital punishment.
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However, even hangings, promoted as a kindlier way to kill, became a horror show in Europe. Executioners were trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience in the United States, such killings were done by local officials, often sheriffs, who might have little or no experience at the gallows. Executioners had to do some complicated math in order to do their jobs correctly. They had to calculate the weight of the victim in ratio to the length of the rope and the likely speed at which the condemned prisoner would drop through the trapdoor at the bottom of the gallows. If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically killing the unfortunate victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be clean and efficient, like the hanging carried out by the US army at the beginning of the movie the Dirty Dozen. Well, Major, what did you think of the hanging? Looked very efficient.
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Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly, was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove. For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious rituals revolved and evolved around these events, with notable exceptions. Before the noose was placed around their necks, the condemned told the sad tale of what led them to such a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however, often strayed from the script.
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Pretty early on, the leaders of the American republic realized that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most of them continue to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, decried what he called the death penalty's, quote, brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the earliest voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that state violence made ordinary.
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Citizens more violent, and there's reason to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that often watched hangings and got drunk. And sometimes fights broke out as witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows. Postcards and mementos were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas, and fights sometimes resulted in injury or death. Some in the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning somber moral lessons, but in fact, picking the pockets of other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding on the gallows. And executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson, assaults and other mayhem as the public would engage in rioting. Not unlike modern cities when they celebrate a home team's win at the World Series.
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These unruly mobs unnerved the upper class, and starting with rhode island in 1833, states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from the public view. By 1845, public executions had been banned in all of New England. This upset death penalty abolitionists who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment. Thus began the process where state governments increasingly killed people in the name of the public in a process shrouded in secrecy.
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Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills. So we'll be back after a few words from our sponsors.
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All I know is what I've been told and that to have truth is a whole lie.
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For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
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I'm telling you. We know Quincy killed her.
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We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
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Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
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My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
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I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff.
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That y' all said.
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They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured.
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Gas on her.
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From lava for good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
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America, y' all better wake the hell up.
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Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
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Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
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I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and on the new season of Heavyweight, I help a centenarian mend a broken heart. How can a 101-year-old woman fall in love again? And I help a man atonement for an armed robbery he committed at 14 years old. And so I pointed the gun at him and said, this isn't a joke. And he got down. And I remember feeling kind of a.
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Surge of like, okay, this is power.
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Plus, my old friend Gregor and his brother tried to solve my problems through hypnotism.
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We could give you a whole brand new thing where you're like super charming all the time, being more able to look people in the eye, not always.
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Hide behind a microphone. Listen to heavyweight on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, an ethology of modern horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for enough Nocturnal tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura Podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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In 1899 in Sampson County, North Carolina, a local hothead named Art Kinsols got into a heated exchange with a neighbor, John C. Herring, at a country store. During the fight, Kinsales grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was arrested for the murder, but he escaped and he was on the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a sheriff's posse, he was captured by, put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to die. By hanging. There, the story got messy. We'll repeat. What we're about to say may be upsetting to some listeners.
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Kinsales was not one to passively accept his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take his own life twice, the first time with sleeping pills and the second time by cutting his own throat. These attempts delayed the execution, but inevitably Kinsales faced his appointment with the hangmen. On September 28, 1900, local authorities used a stepladder as a gallows. Kinsales did not fall from a sufficient height to break his neck consequently, and the neck wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose. A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified spectators that Kinsals was still alive.
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Officers cut him down and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time he died. In an era in which executions took place all the time, Kinsel's gory death cut through the fog and made national news. The Virginia Pilot called the scene revolting. During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common. Sometimes, because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoners heads were yanked off, sometimes ropes ripped apart, with the prisoner falling to the ground, only to be hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned slowly strangled to death.
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John Harris, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in 1913, actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one newspaper quote, prisoner Tortured through Bungling at an Execution. According to an estimate made in 1993 by a legal team representing a client who was facing death by hanging in Washington State between the years 1622 and 1993, authorities bungled 170 of about 8,000 legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering for the prisoners and more than 2% of the death sentences carried out by this technique.
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The growing middle class and upper class in the United States became squeamish about hanging. As one writer put it, bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of death itself, but not incompetence and mismanagement. By the early 1880s, the New York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed, and graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong. In 1885, in response to the mounting public concerns, New York Governor David Bennett Hill declared, the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the Dark Ages. It may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means of taking the life of those condemned to die in a less barbarous manner.
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As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew among elites, the New York Medico Legal Society first suggested research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal injection in the 1870s. But a different technology arose that delayed the advent of that protocol by more than a century.
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Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man. He took credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistants who toiled at his Menlo, New Jersey laboratory. Edison was also a genius at public relations, and he would come to dominate several industries. In the early 1870s, his team had developed a feasible incandescent light bulb that ran on the direct current or DC system as Edison himself described it. On October 21, 1871. Numerous experiments resulted in the production of a small unit map of comparatively enormous resistance, the filament being under conditions of great stability. After the result, I know the problem.
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Of approached commercial solution.
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In 1879, Edison submitted his patent for an electric lamp. In 1880 the Edison Illuminating Company opened for business and soon provided lights for New York and other cities. In the early days of the electric industry, fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In 1881, George Lemuel Smith, an intoxicated Buffalo bricklayer, stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself by touching a generator.
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An autopsy led some doctors to conclude that Smith died quickly and painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to Smith's untimely death by suggesting that perhaps electric power could provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid society of convicted murderers and rapists.
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Enter a Buffalo dentist, Alfred porter Southwick and Dr. George Fell of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals who both experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current. The early results were often horrifying, with the animal sometimes burning alive. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described electrocution as the safest and kindest method of killing.
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In 1886, New York State formed a commission the study of prisoners could humanely be put to death in a similar way. The so called Jerry commission falsely claimed that electrocuted animals, tortured in a series of experiments died supposedly rapidly and efficiently. Thomas Edison would soon see a business opportunity in state killing.
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At the time, Edison was locked in a so called current war with another robber baron, business tycoon George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's labs had developed a system that ran on alternating current or ac, a system that was more efficient, more popular and less prone to breakdown. Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions. But the so called wizard of Menlo park wanted to prove that the much safer Westinghouse system was in fact dangerous. Edison had his engineers electrocute animals using the AC current in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system. His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the State of New York to hook up its first electric chair, invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick. And Edison connected that chair to an AC power system.
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The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet during a drunken rage. The jury ordered him to Die by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity for Kemmler to die in agony as the first man killed an electric chair in order to fatally damage Westinghouse reputation and and that of the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of his AC generators to New York State out of fear that they would be used to execute Kemmler. But Edison sent his men to find secondhand Westinghouse equipment, which ended up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly hired an attorney for Kemmler, but the appeals failed. At 6:38 in the morning, August 6, 1890, Kemmler became an unwilling pioneer.
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On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by Kemmler's calm demeanor as he wished everyone in the death chamber good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair, the executioner pulled a switch and Kemmler's body convulsed and became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead. Kemmler started to drool and a second jolt was ordered. Kemmler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described as a, quote, pungent and sickening odor.
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Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemmler's agonizing death, they would have done better with an axe. The mayhem didn't matter, and Edison's plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success and stuck with the method for decades to come. 26 other states adopted the electric chair as a method of execution. Kemmler's death would be the first of many so called botched executions over the next century. As Lawson Surratt wrote in gruesome spectacles, 80 of the executions gone awry in the next century involved the electric chair, with the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, others resulting in fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh, and a prolonged period from the start to the completion.
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Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death, the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison guards often got blisters if they touched the body too soon. In 1923, a man named F.G. bullen would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the same day. Prison officials actually placed him in a casket, thinking he was dead, when a guard noticed he was still breathing. Bullen was then carried back to the chair and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully.
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Before the start of the 20th century, critics knew that both hanging and the electric chair Were exercises in barbarity. In the lone star state, Ferdinand eugene daniel, the editor of the texas medical journal, Was an advocate of eugenics. An opponent of capital punishment, he argued that castrating men from families with criminal histories Would be a way to prevent criminals from being born in the first place. Castrating criminals was more humane, he said, Than hanging or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to a life of crime. Daniel accepted that executions would take place for the foreseeable future. So he wanted to make the death penalty a vehicle for medical research.
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Instead of hanging or electrocuting prisoners, Daniel suggested in a 1906 issue of the texas medical journal that the state should sedate them and, while unconscious, Subject them to medical experiments. Inject into him various disease germs, watch their progress, and when through with him, inject about 10 drops of Prussic acid into the veins of his arms, and he will die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Dr. Joseph Mengele and other nazi scientists Would conduct similar experiments A little more than three decades later. But as professor lane explained to us, even before Dr. Daniel made his disturbing suggestion in the texas medical journal, Doctors knew that death by lethal injection Would.
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Be a horrifying experience when states turned.
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From hanging to the electric chair. This is back in 1890, there was actually a study. There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair, and that report actually considered death by drugs a lethal injection. And in that report, they said, we considered and rejected this. And they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties.
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Professor lane noted that Even in the 19th century, doctors knew that the criminal population Had a higher tendency towards drug abuse and poor health that would make it difficult to access a vein with a needle in order to deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, Doctors were queasy about involvement in executions that violated the hippocratic oath, which says, in part, I will do no harm or injustice to patients or, quote, administer a poison to anyone when asked to do so, Nor will I suggest such a course. Professor lane noted that a government commission studying lethal injection in the late 19th century prophetically said that not only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue, but so would the likely refusal of doctors to take part because of ethical concerns. This could mean that lethal injection Would be carried out by amateurs.
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So, you know, these people have notoriously bad veins. They are elderly. They are of poor health. They are often former drug users. How did we know this in 1890 and didn't think about this in 1977? But that was one reason. The other reason was they said, we're not going to be able to do this without the medical profession. We're not going to be able to do it competently, and the sustained and strong opposition of the medical profession makes this not viable.
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There were other, less popular alternatives to hanging in the electric chair in the 1900s. In 1924, Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of stray pets in animal shelters provided a model for human executions, and again, there were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the chambers themselves sometimes leaked, putting witnesses in.
- [37:17]
C
Danger, as with the electric chair. Death penalty advocates claimed that the modern technology had provided a guilt free method for the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Dr. Richard Traitsman from John Hopkins University School of Medicine wrote, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.
- [37:46]
A
Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poison gas as their preferred method of execution. But witnesses consistently reported the condemned seemed to die agonizing, struggling deaths in which they convulsed and retched and sometimes screamed. In 1960, California executed Carol Chessman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous acclaimed books, while on death row. Before his execution, Chessman told reporters who would witness his death that he would nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while he was gassed. Reporters said that Chessman indeed nodded his head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes.
- [38:26]
C
By the time of Chessman's death, the United States was less than a decade from the longest pause in executions in its history. Numerous judicial challenges to capital punishment based on numerous racial biases, police misconduct, and other issues resulted in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid-1960s. At issue was the obvious racism of the death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and who ended up the target of state killing. As Bryan Stevenson, a New York University law professor and the founder and executive director of the Equal justice initiative, explained.
- [39:05]
A
In 2007, in the United States, we are struggling with capital punishment and its implementation. A Short, Quick legal history In 1972, the United States Supreme Court struck down the death penalty after recognizing that it was being applied in an arbitrary manner. The court in 72 noted that 87% of the people executed for the crime of rape were black men convicted of raping white women. 100% of the people executed in the United States between 1930 and 1972 for the crime of rape were executed for offenses involving victims who were white, even though it was believed that women of color were three times as likely to be the victims of sexual assault.
- [39:46]
C
That racism would play a major factor in the largest pause in executions in the history of the American death penalty. The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU filed challenges to the death penalty based on racial bias across the country. And these legal teams won numerous days of execution. As Harvard law professor Cal Steicher Observed in a YouTube video, a de facto ban of executions had taken place by the late 1960s.
- [40:15]
E
The death penalty was in decline already in the 1960s in the United States, as it was in Europe. But the LDF's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt. So from 1967 to 1972, in the five years penalty prior to the decision in Furman v. Georgia, there were no executions in the United States.
- [40:39]
A
Three death penalty cases, Furman v. Georgia, Jackson v. Georgia, and Branch versus Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court and were consolidated in 1972. All three defendants were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with raping white women. As previously noted, no white man had ever been executed for the rape of an African American woman or child in American history. In June 1972, the U.S. supreme Court issued a 5 to 4 decision in Furman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then practiced was.
- [41:14]
E
Unconstitutional, so that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it to use the words that they used. It was wantonly and freakishly imposed. The immediate aftermath of Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death, and there were some 600 ish people on death row at the time of the Furman litigation, all had their death penalties invalidated. So they were all sent to the general population. They had to be re sentenced to a sentence other than death. Moreover, when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as it then existed, anyone whose death sentence was pending that case had to be dropped. Because those statutes were no longer valid.
- [42:00]
C
No executions took place for another four years. The Supreme Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries were given in capital cases were too vague. This gave states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws. By 1976, 35 states had adopted new statutes addressing the issues and raised in Furman. On July 2, 1976, in its Greg vs. Georgia decision, the Supreme Court by a 7:2 margin upheld the death penalty. In states like Texas, where the court found jury instructions were clear and specific. The death penalty was set to resume after a decade long pause. It took a mere 199 days for state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer, Gary Gilmore by firing squad on January 17, 1977.
- [42:55]
A
The extreme violence of Gilmour's execution, which inspired a 1979 Pulitzer Prize winning journalism based novel called the Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless, the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a problem. As Professor Lane writes, the Oklahoma electric chair was falling apart and needed to be repaired. But by the 1970s, many legislators were put off by the brutality of that execution method and sought something more modern.
- [43:28]
C
Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter, Tony Garrett, filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned. But politicians across the country were unnerved at the prospect of the public watching a man essentially burn alive in their names and what that could do to support for the death penalty.
- [43:55]
A
It was at this time that a member of the Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community and asked them for help in designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection. Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently like veterinarians euthanizing animals. But doctors wanted nothing to do with killing people. That's when Oklahoma State Coroner Dr. Jay Chapman stepped in. Referring to the physicians who refused to help, he said, quote, to hell with them, let's do this. Professor Lane explained what happened next.
- [44:26]
F
I document in the book legislators talking about how, you know, I don't know that the country's gonna wanna see this sort of violence. All we've got is the electric chair, all we've got is the gas chamber. People are going to be queasy about this and we need to find a different way. And unknown to many, or at least unappreciated, is the fact that a federal court had recognized at the time a first Amendment right to televise executions. Now, it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that. And so one of the things I also found was state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't have an electrocution in someone's living room, right? The, the public is not going to go for this. And so they were, they were looking for a different way. They talked about, you know, what about a death by drugs. And they are asking the state medical Association. They're asking their personal doctors, they're asking everybody they can find. No one wants to play. But they get to, and this is in Oklahoma, they get to the State Medical Examiner, Dr. Jay Chapman, and he refers to himself as an expert in dead bodies, but not in how to get them that way.
- [45:47]
C
In spite of his self confessed ignorance, Chapman made up out of thin air a three drug protocol that would be used in executions across the country for the next three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in sodium theopental, which was designed to kill like a barbiturate overdose, pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing, and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest.
- [46:23]
A
Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or into how they interacted with each other. And neither did the state of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this, Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by every single state that had the death penalty. Lane described her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman who seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this execution method.
- [46:48]
F
And I later came across an interview of him where they asked, you know, how did you come up with the three drug protocol that every state used, every single state for 35, 40 years? And he said, I didn't do any research. I just thought about what might be useful, what you might need. You wanted two drugs so that if one didn't kill him, the other did. And then the interviewer said, well, why did you add a third drug? And he said, why not? I didn't do any research, why does it matter why I chose it? So he makes it up and the state of Oklahoma adopts it basically in an afternoon. No expert testimony, no committee hearings, no review of the medical science, veterinary literature, nothing. And it takes hold and all of the other states blindly follow it.
- [47:48]
C
It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he had done any research, he would have found that the components of his three drug protocol worked at cross purposes. Anesthesiologists believe that the amount and speed at which the sodium theopental is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's happening to them. Meanwhile, the sodium theopental also slows down blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer a racing heart, but not have a fatal heart attack. The combined effect in many cases is a slow suffocation that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in the lungs. In essence, with lethal injection, states slowly drown the paralyzed who struggle but are unable to cry for help. When lethal injections have not gone according to plan, the execution sometimes lasts hours, the agonizing deaths hidden from the general public.
- [48:52]
A
Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the difficulty of obtaining all the drugs from pharmaceutical firms that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year, 24 states provide for some form of lethal injection and as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era in 1982 with the execution of Charlie Brooks. In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss why lethal injections peaked in the 90s, how states got around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how this has all been a mixed blessing for the approximately 2,100 prisoners on death row. I'm Steven Moncelli for It Could Happen.
- [49:43]
C
Here and until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening.
- [49:50]
B
It Could Happen Here is a production.
- [49:52]
A
Of Cool Zone Media.
- [49:53]
B
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us.
- [49:59]
C
Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
- [50:01]
F
Or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [50:03]
B
You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening. The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [50:25]
A
America, y' all better wake the hell up.
- [50:27]
C
Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
- [50:37]
B
Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [50:51]
D
Hey, I'm Kyle McLaughlin. You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex and the City, or just the Internet Stand. I have a new podcast called what Are We Even Doing? Where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture. Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me to talk about navigating this high speed rollercoaster we call reality. Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what Are We Even Doing on the IHEARTRADIO app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [51:28]
A
Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu. Every single episode.
- [51:38]
B
32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop.
- [51:42]
E
What?
- [51:42]
A
Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan Klepper. Listen to season four of SNAFU with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The Rich Russians Falling out of Windows podcast is back. Sad Oligarch Season 2 Since we left you in 2023 after season one, many politically motivated Russian millionaires have continued to die in suspicious circumstances. Season two gets very weird. Listen to Sad Oligarch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.