NewsMax.com Wires
Monday, Jan. 22, 2001

In the death penalty appeal of Daniel Colwell, who shot to death an Ellaville couple in a shopping center parking lot in 1996, the state's highest court will be presented with a voluminous record documenting death by electrocution.

Included will be autopsy results following 23 Georgia executions, post-electrocution photos and a harrowing audiotape recording of a Georgia prison official's observations as he witnessed a botched execution in 1984.

"The evolving standards of decency in Georgia require us to put aside the electric chair as a means of execution," says Michael Mears, a lawyer for Colwell.

In court motions, state Attorney General Thurbert Baker is urging the court to turn down the challenge. His motions contend Mears failed to properly introduce evidence in pretrial hearings to challenge the state's use of the chair.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments on the issue less than two weeks after Fulton County Superior Judge Wendy Shoob declared the chair unconstitutional. Shoob said electrocution violates the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruel and unusual punishment and involves "physical violence indicative of inhumanity."

But Shoob's order, entered in the case against Timothy Dawson, accused of killing three men in the Atlanta Hilton & Towers in October 1998, applies only to her courtroom.

Colwell's case affects all 126 men and one woman currently on Georgia's death row.

Last year, the General Assembly abolished the electric chair for crimes committed after May 1, 2000, requiring the state to switch to lethal injection. But legislators – worried about court challenges to death sentences already imposed and disinclined to apply a law retroactively – retained the chair for those already on death row.

Still, the General Assembly added a caveat: If the U.S. Supreme Court or Georgia Supreme Court ever finds the chair unconstitutional, lethal injection would be used for the 127 people currently on death row.

In her order, Shoob recounted witness accounts of electric chair executions nationwide that resulted in lingering death or body mutilation. And she made note of Alpha Otis Stephens' execution in 1984, which required two two-minute jolts of 2,080 volts of electricity to kill him.

The Department of Corrections tapes a prison official's commentary as he witnesses an execution. In the Stephens recording, the official reported: "There was one small jerk from the condemned at the time the execution was executed." He added that after one minute had elapsed, Stephens "appears to be relaxing a little bit more now." But as the electrocution wound down, Stephens was "still moving his head."

After the process was finished, doctors waited five minutes to allow the body to cool down before checking vital signs. During the first two minutes, Stephens did not move. But then the observer reported, "He is moving his head slightly. ... From my vantage point, I do detect, or it seems to be, that he is breathing."

When two physicians checked Stephens' vital signs, they determined he was still alive. The execution was then repeated, and Stephens gave "one big jerk" as the process started again. But halfway into it, the observer noted, "He is still at this time moving his head from side to side and appears to be breathing."

After the second two-minute jolt of electricity was administered, a prison official was overhead saying, "You're going to have to check those sponges and connectors. They don't appear to be connected right."

Five minutes later, Stephens was finally pronounced dead.

Thomas West, a lawyer who won the recent ruling from Shoob, said such evidence calls for abolition of the chair. "It clearly goes beyond extinguishing life and gets into the realm of torture, disfiguration of the human body and prolonged suffering," he said. "Using electricity for execution is barbaric."

Copyright 2001 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution