Dead Man Walking Reading Response #2

Reading Hours: Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean, 9/10 30 mins., 9/11 1 hour, 9/12 20 mins., 9/13 20 mins., 9/14 30 mins.

This week, I continued to read Dead Man Walking, the true story about a man named Pat who is sentenced to death in the electric chair. The few people who cared about him did their best to save him, but their attempts were in vain.  Throughout the book, I questioned whether the death penalty was justified, and I tried to consider both the viewpoints of the victim and the criminal, and that was the topic of my last reading response.  After reading this book, I feel that death by the electric chair was particularly cruel and unnecessary.  I know that this reading response is not supposed to be a summary of the book, but I feel that I need to describe some of the details in the book to make the reader understand my thoughts on the electric chair.

            The electric chair was invented by Thomas Jefferson in the 1800’s, and it was first used in 1890 in New York.  There are three different jolts of electricity that are used in the death penalty.  The first is 1900 volts, and it is designed to cause unconsciousness and brain death.  The second jolt is 500 volts, and it causes the vital organs to shut down.  The third volt is 1900 volts, and it is to make sure that the person is really dead.  The author, Helen Prejean, describes in vivid detail the effects of the electric chair on a few of its previous victims.  Among other things, the prisoner defecates and urinates on himself and vomits blood, his fingers and toes curl upwards, and his arms and legs become contorted.  Sometimes his eyeballs actually pop out, and sometimes he catches on fire. The skin burns and the execution room smells like frying bacon. The idea was that the first volt causes the prisoner to loose consciousness right away, so the execution is painless, but research has shown that this isn’t correct.  There have been several cases where the full process of three jolts has been carried out, but the prisoner was still alive.  In one case, a prisoner walked away from an execution after several jolts.  They sent him back to his cell to recuperate.  The U.S. Supreme Court was split on whether it was cruel and unusual punishment to electrocute him again, but he was re-electrocuted a year later.

            Based on what I have read, it is my opinion that the electric chair is very painful and cruel and should not be used.  Other methods of execution seem to be more humane, such as firing squads and lethal injection. They are relatively painless and quick, and they work every time. If we feel the need to kill a human being in punishment for something they have done, we should make sure that they are going to actually die and that it is quick and painless.  Otherwise, we are lowering ourselves to the standards of the prisoner when he committed that crime that put him on death row.

            Note:  After I wrote this reading response, I did some research into the death penalty in Louisiana and found that in 1991, the state changed its method of execution to lethal injection.  This seems like a much more humane way to kill people than the electric chair.   I feel validated.