BY DAVID FUTRELLE | Illustration by Bill Koeb

ob Butterworth must be sorely disappointed. Last week, after foot-long flames erupted from the head of an inmate strapped into "Old Sparky," Florida's antique electric chair, the state's attorney general hailed the grisly death as a warning to others contemplating crimes. "People who wish to commit murder, they better not do it in the state of Florida because we may have a problem with our electric chair," Butterworth crowed. Now it turns out there was more fire than smoke: Earlier this week, two medical examiners concluded that convicted killer Pedro Medina "suffered no pain when flames shot from the mask over his face," as the Associated Press put it, since by then he had already been killed. Still, the news didn't exactly give me much comfort. As someone who considers the electric chair an instrument of barbarism only a step or two above the Iron Maiden (the torture device, not the band), I was more appalled by Butterworth's comment than I was by the flames themselves. Butterworth wasn't simply praising the execution as a noble act of retribution against a man who'd carelessly and cruelly taken the life of another -- no, he seemed to take the same sort of pleasure in Medina's pain that small children do in pulling the wings off flies.