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Assume the position, Newt
Former House Speaker Gingrich faces embarrassing questions about his sex life and marital fidelity.
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[09/08/99]

Commentary's scurrilous attack on Edward Said
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Get over it, David!
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[09/07/99]

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[09/04/99]

Trouble in "Holy City"
The man behind the Kansas creationism controversy worries that the flap has awakened his opponents -- who hope he's right.
By Laura Rozen
[09/03/99]

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I have to disagree.

This past July I watched the last Florida execution, with two dozen other witnesses, through a glass window, as if viewing some bizarre promotional stunt in a radio studio. I saw 344-pound Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis scream in horror through his leather mask, and writhe against his straps. I watched blood pour down the front of his white button-down shirt, a spectacle no one present could quite explain.

Leave for another day the debate over capital punishment itself, or whether Davis deserved mercy for the brutal murder of a pregnant Jacksonville woman and her two young daughters. What remains stunningly incomprehensible to me is why, on the eve of the new millennium, Florida would want to remain one of four states that still use the electric chair when lethal injection is available.

More than a century after the electric chair was invented, Florida leads the nation in electric-chair executions. The only other states that exclusively practice electrocution are Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska. Nearly all of the other 38 states with a death penalty give prisoners at least a choice of lethal injection, with rare alternatives including the gas chamber, hanging or firing squad. Texas, where George W. Bush is now governor, led the majority of states in switching to lethal injection in 1982.

Since 1976, Florida has executed more people than any state except Texas and Virginia. Twice in the last decade, in 1990 and 1997, flames have sprouted from the heads of executed men at Florida State Prison. There have been electrical burns to heads and legs. But Davis' execution was the first that became a bloody spectacle.

I was there because my name had come up in the reporter pool. I debated whether to take the spot because I knew I would soon be taking another assignment with my newspaper, the Palm Beach Post, that had nothing to do with death penalty reporting. Besides, it wasn't a local case. But in the end, I told myself that as a citizen, I ought to have the guts to witness the most important act the state commits in the public's name.

I did not sleep the night before at the Day's Inn in Starke, an aptly named rural town in north-central Florida where the prison is one of the area's largest employers.

Davis, 54, was so massive that he had to be rolled to the chamber in a wheelchair. To accommodate his girth, the wooden frame of the electric chair had been specially rebuilt, for the first time since inmates constructed Florida's original chair in the 1920s. The fear was that if the chair collapsed, guards and other attendants in the execution chamber might be electrocuted by the exposed wiring.

There was a microphone for his last words, but Davis shook his head and said nothing. With his head shaved, he looked like Marlon Brando's Col. Kurtz in the movie "Apocalypse Now." Until they put the mask over his face, Davis could see us. Among the witnesses were the victim's husband and father, who did not speak or change expression.

Next page | If the prisoner suffers, so be it