ELECTRIC CHAIR

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 October 1931, Page 10

ELECTRIC CHAIR

AN AMERICAN ANNIVERSARY. The United States has been “celebrating” the fortieth anniversary of the. first execution . by the electric chair. Great indignation was expressed by the London papers of the ‘nineties at the news that William Kemmler, condemned for killing a woman with an axe, had been executed by this new method. “The guillotine and the hangman's rope do not compare in cold-blooded barbarism with the chair,” declared the “Daily Chronicle, ’ while the “Standard” predicted that the “execution will send a thrill of indignation throughout the civilised world,” and added that the “scene may be described as a disgrace to our common humanity.” In the United States, too, there was bitter opposition. The legal battle fought over the condemnation of Kemmler reached the United States ; Supreme Court where the sentence i was sustained. Papers were vehement in their denunciations of the method of execution since adopted by many States as the most humane means of capital punishment. Electrical companies opposed, it, for they feared that the advertisement of the

deadly power of “chained lightning” —as electricity, then in its infancy, was called—would seriously handicap its development. Newspaper reporters were not allowed to be present at the first execution. The electric, chair then used was burned during Auburn Prison’s first riot on July 28, 1929.