THE DEVIL'S CHAIR
The killer whose head burst into flames and a doctor soaked in blood… the brutal reality of botched death row executions
One boy of 14, who turned out to be innocent, was so small when he was executed he had to sit on a book
THE use of the death sentence in the US has long caused split opinion, with critics labelling the practice barbaric.
Now a new method of execution - branded ‘torture’ by the UN - is set to be trialled on a convicted killer for the first time.
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Kenneth Eugene Smith, jailed in 1996 for the murder of preacher’s wife Elizabeth Sennett, is facing death by nitrogen gas after losing a last minute appeal in Alabama.
The process, which his lawyers call “a cruel and unusual punishment”, will see an airtight mask placed on his face and the lethal gas pumped in, starving him of oxygen.
Medics warn the untested method could cause catastrophic problems, ranging from violent convulsions to survival in a vegetative state, while his legal team say the 58-year-old is likely to “choke on his own vomit”.
The state of Alabama has 30 hours from the ruling at 6am, British time, to carry out the proposed execution, which was adopted after the drugs used in lethal injections became more difficult to find.
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The move comes two years after Smith survived a botched lethal injection, with executioners unable to raise a vein before the state's death warrant expired.
But previous death row execution methods had proved equally controversial - with electric chairs causing inmates' heads to burst into flames and injections prompting convulsions and agonising slow deaths.
Here we look at the gruesome legacy of botched executions in America.
Head 'burst into flames'
Dad-of-two Jesse Tafero was asleep in a car in Florida in 1976 with his wife Sonia Jacobs and their children, as well as a man named Walter Rhodes, when they were challenged by police.
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In the ensuing row, two officers were shot and Jesse was found guilty of murder, after Rhodes testified he fired the fatal shots.
It wasn’t until after Tafero’s death that Rhodes admitted to killing the men - but his execution, on May 4, 1990, was like a scene from a horror movie.
Strapped to an electric chair, which malfunctioned three times, Tafero’s head burst into six inch flames.
One witness later said: “It takes seven minutes before the prison doctor pronounced him dead, seven minutes of heaving, nodding, flame, and smoke.”
The horrific scene is thought to have inspired an execution in Stephen King’s The Green Mile and led to Florida changing from the chair to lethal injection.
Soaked in blood
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Rapist and murderer Clayton Lockett was a career criminal who was jailed for burglary by the time he was 16.
In 1999, he and two accomplices went to the house of Oklahoma man Bobby Bornt, who owed them money for drugs, and launched an attack.
He and his accomplices also raped a young woman, Summer Hair, who turned up at his address, and murdered her friend Stephanie Neiman after she threatened to go to the police.
Lockett was sentenced to death for murder and rape in 2000.
After 14 years on death row, he had to be tasered by prison guards to get him to the death chamber for lethal injection on April 29, 2014.
Nine failed attempts were made to get a needle into veins in his arms, neck, collar bone and feet, before they finally injected a sedative into his groin.
They then injected potassium chloride, which should have stopped his heart immediately, but merely slowed it down.
Three minutes after being declared unconscious, Lockett started to struggle violently and speak, with some sources claiming he cried "something's wrong” and attempted to get off the table.
A paramedic told him to “take deep breaths” and in another attempt to inject more drugs, the doctor hit an artery, causing blood to squirt all over him.
A witness named Edith Shoals ran out of the room, and later recalled: “It was like a horror movie. He kept trying to talk.”
The execution was eventually called off, but Lockett died of a heart attack on the way to hospital.
Terrified teen
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George Stinney was just 14 when he was sentenced to death for the murder of two girls in 1944, despite a lack of evidence.
The bodies of Betty Binnicker, 11, and seven-year-old Mary Thames were found in a ditch in segregated South Carolina in March 1944.
As he had been seen speaking to them on the day, Stinny was arrested.
After being interrogated for hours, without an adult representative, cops claimed he had confessed to murdering the girls after one of them refused to have sex with him, and one officer testified he had led them to the weapon, a 15 inch metal rod.
An all-white jury took just 10 minutes to find him guilty.
When he went to the electric chair the teen, who weighed under 7st, was so small he had to sit on a book, and the mask used to cover his face was too big.
The terrified boy survived the first round of 2,400 volts, which caused the mask to slip and reveal his tear-strewn face.
It would take two more shocks to kill him, leaving the stench of burning flesh in the air.
In 2014, 70 years after his death, his conviction was overturned by a court in South Carolina.
Sparks and smoke
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Texas born Evans had a string of violent robberies and kidnappings behind him when he shot and killed a pawn shop owner in Alabama, in 1977, during a botched raid.
He was sent to the electric chair on April 22, 1983, but survived shocks of 1,900 volts.
An electrode then came loose and his lawyer, Russell Canan, later described the gruesome events that followed.
“A large puff of greyish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans’s face,” he said. “An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room.”
The electrode was then reattached, and a second surge of power was sent through Evans’ body.
“The stench of burning flesh was nauseating”, Canan reported, and the room filled with smoke, but his heart was still beating.
After a third shock Evans was pronounced dead - having suffered 14 minutes of effectively being burnt alive.
Foot long flames
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Cuban refugee Pedro Medina was convicted of murdering neighbour Dorothy James in 1982, after he was found driving her car.
Although he protested his innocence to his last breath, he was sent to the chair 15 years later.
With 2,000 volts of electricity passing through his body, a journalist reported “blue and orange flames up to a foot long shot from the right side” of his head, “and flickered for 6 to 10 seconds.”
Witness Michael Minerva said: “They’re burning him alive.”
Florida introduced lethal injection as a method for executions a few years later.
Slow death
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Joseph Wood was sentenced to death on two counts after shooting dead his estranged girlfriend Debra Dietz and her father, Eugene, on August 7, 1989, in Arizona.
The execution by lethal injection should have been over in 10 minutes, but instead it took almost two hours.
Seven minutes after the drugs entered his system, Wood’s lips started moving and he attempted to break the straps holding him onto the gurney.
Lawyer Dale Baich said: “He continued to gasp, gulp, and struggle to breathe, and that went on for an hour and 40 minutes.”
Wood was injected a total of 15 times, breaking rules in Arizona, and the combination of drugs in question had been an experimental and controversial mix.
Debra Dietz 'sister, Jeanne Brown, witnessed the scene and told reporters: "What I saw today with him being executed, it is nothing compared to what happened on August 7, 1989.
“What's excruciating is seeing your father... [and] your sister lying in a pool of blood.”
Bruising and puncture marks
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Joe James Jr was sentenced to death in Alabama for the 1994 murder of his ex-girlfriend Faith Hall.
After a campaign of stalking and threats, he followed her to a friend’s apartment and shot her four times.
His execution by injection, on July 28, 2022, was scheduled for 6pm, but he was not pronounced dead until three hours later.
According to the Alabama Corrections Commissioner, John Hamm, James was not sedated and a subsequent autopsy revealed puncture wounds and bruising around his knuckles and wrists, suggesting unsuccessful attempts to insert IV lines.
'Drowning in vomit'
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Grant was serving a sentence of 130 years for armed robbery in an Oklahoma jail when he stabbed prison cafeteria worker Gay Carter 16 times in a dispute over his breakfast in 1998.
He was sentenced to death and taken for execution, by lethal injection, on October 28, 2021.
After the first drug, midazolam, was administered, the 60-year-old began convulsing and vomiting.
Prison staff wiped the vomit from his face and neck and Sean Murphy, a journalist who had witnessed 14 previous executions, reported he "began to convulse – pretty hard, I would say – and then began vomiting about a minute later,” adding he’d never seen a similar reaction before.
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Public prosecutor Julie Gardner called the execution "horrifying" and stated that Grant was struggling and gasping for breath, adding: "It appeared like he was drowning in his own vomit."
He was pronounced dead 21 minutes after he was first administered midazolam.
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