But when the executioner pulled the lever to release the pellets, a mechanical malfunction delayed the drop and the ensuing vaporization for four minutes, during which time the puzzled inmate kept straining to detect the fumes. Twenty seconds later he appeared unconscious and his breathing “was rapid and violent, accompanied by groans and grunts so loud that they could be heard through the concrete-covered steel walls of the chamber.” Although his breathing stopped after two more minutes, his body continued to undergo spasms, until, finally, a witness wrote, “The Negro’s lips drew back over his teeth in a ghastly grin of death”—something one medical expert later called a “sardonic smile” that signified an involuntary reflex of the muscles around the mouth.71
After the gas was cleared and Sanford’s lifeless body was removed from the chamber, the last prisoner was brought in. Watson was described as “one of the most intelligent looking Negroes ever executed at the prison here.” After the lever was pulled, he appeared unconscious within thirty seconds of taking his first breath, but his attempts to breathe and strains against the straps persisted violently for more than a minute until the same ghastly grin came over his face as well.72 Afterward, with four gassings on his record, Dr. Peterson defended his new method against any and all criticism, blaming the media for being uninformed laymen who had no background or training in executions of criminals.73
Six weeks later North Carolina executed two more men.74 Then two more blacks, one of them seventy-three years old, were gassed on August 21.75 In December, Martin Moore, a twenty-two-year-old African-American who continued to repudiate his “confession” was pronounced dead twelve and a half minutes after entering the gas chamber, making him the twenty-third person executed and the nineteenth person gassed to death in North Carolina in 1936.76 At that pace, North Carolina was carrying out almost as many executions as New York, a much more populous state, did in its Sing Sing electric chair.
North Carolina’s reliance on the gas chamber was unmatched among all the states in the 1930s. By the end of 1941 the gas chamber had claimed eighty-two lives, at least sixty-eight of them African-American—many of them for crimes other than murder. Several classic criminological studies would find North Carolina punished least severely whites who had killed, raped, or burglarized blacks and penalized most severely blacks who killed, raped, or burglarized whites.77 Its use of capital punishment also disproportionately targeted persons of low intelligence—a class of citizens the state also sought to curb through its strong eugenics program of compulsory sterilization and institutionalization.78
By the late 1930s, however, many key players in North Carolina had grown uneasy with the gas chamber. Another horrible spectacle surrounded the double execution in February 1938 of Edgar Smoak and Milford Exum, both of which dragged on for interminable spans—thirteen and seventeen minutes, respectively.79 Former warden H.H. Honeycutt publicly favored returning to electrocution, saying, “The gas chamber is horrible. Gas is so long and drawn out…. I believe most of the men on death row would rather die by electricity than gas.”80
In late 1938 Governor Clyde Roarke Hoey expressed concern that lethal gas asphyxiation was slower and consequently “far less humane” than electrocution.81 Clergymen, editors, physicians, and members of the general public also voiced their disdain for the painful and protracted nature of gas executions. Gruesome accounts of the gassings at Central Prison continued into the 1940s, leaving many North Carolinians ashamed of their state, particularly as they became more aware of what was happening in Europe.
North Carolina was not alone in gassing mentally retarded persons. In 1936 Colorado experienced a case that would come back to haunt the state for many years; as late as 2007 groups were demanding a posthumous pardon and other remedies. The story began when Frank Aguilar, a thirty-four-year-old Mexican laborer, was arrested for the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl in Pueblo on August 15, 1936. He confessed after police found the murder weapon in his home, admitting that he had a grudge against the girl’s father. There was no mention or other evidence of an accomplice. Aguilar was quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. But police in Cheyenne, Wyoming, later arrested a twenty-year-old vagrant, Joe Arridy, who obviously was severely retarded but who claimed that he had participated in the crime in Pueblo with “Frank.” Arridy, a child of Syrian immigrants, had run away from the Colorado State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives and was picked up by Wyoming police sixteen days after the murder. The Wyoming State Tribune labeled Arridy a “feebleminded moron,” noting that his story changed every time he told it, but Cheyenne’s police chief insisted he was guilty. Despite doubts about his guilt, Arridy was charged with capital murder, and a trial was held to determine if he was sane. Although his IQ was measured at 46, authorities said he knew the difference between right and wrong, and therefore he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death.
Arridy’s appellate attorney, Gail Ireland, pleaded for Arridy’s life to be spared, saying, “Believe me when I say that if he is gassed, it will take a long time for the state of Colorado to live down the disgrace.” But the conviction was narrowly affirmed, and Aguilar went to his death without being called upon to testify about Arridy’s innocence or guilt.82 As the gas was being pumped into the chamber around Aguilar, one of the witnesses, Ed Hamilton, fifty-seven, of Pueblo, suffered a heart attack and died a short time later.83
Meanwhile, on death row Warden Best and many of the convicts took a liking to the “simple-minded” youth, buying him toy trains and picture books, which led to a stream of heart-wrenching newspaper stories and pictures. One account included a transcript from this exchange that was tape-recorded on December 1, 1938.
“Don’t you [Arridy] want to be killed?” somebody asked.
“No, I want to live,” Arridy replied, “I want to live here with Warden Best.”
“Don’t you want to go back to the home in Grand Junction [an institution he ran away from six years earlier]?”
“No, I want to get a life sentence and stay here with Warden Best. At the home the kids used to beat me.”
“Would you rather be here Joe?”
“Yes I want to stay here, I can’t get in trouble here…”
“Do you remember after the little girls were killed, you ran to the train, and they arrested you in Cheyenne, Wyoming?”
“No, I don’t remember that. But I remember the judge wanted to kill me.”
“You know what it means to go to the gas house, don’t you Joe?”
“Yes, they kill you there. But I don’t want to be killed. I want a life sentence and stay here all the time.”
In the end, on January 6, 1939, Best and Father Albert Schaller accompanied Arridy to the gas chamber. Best asked the grinning youth if he still planned to raise chickens in heaven. “No,” Arridy replied, “I would like to play the harp like Father Schaller told me I could.”84 Then Best put him to death.
Best continued to fine-tune his executions in an effort to show that they minimized suffering. On September 30, 1939, he personally put to death two convicted murderers by releasing the gas into the acid containers beneath their chairs. One of them—Pete Catalina, forty-one, a Salida pool hall operator who had supposedly shot a patron to death during an argument over a fifty-cent bag of poker chips—was hooked up to a cardiogram that recorded each of his heartbeats before and during the action. I.D. Price, the electrical expert who operated the cardiac instruments for the occasion, reported that Catalina’s heartbeat had appeared strong and even for one minute and ten seconds, then stopped abruptly when he inhaled the deadly fumes, supposedly showing that he had died quickly and without fear. The other executed man, Angelo Agnes, a thirty-one-year-old African-American from Denver who had been condemned for slaying his estranged wife, was pronounced dead exactly two minutes after the warden pulled his string.85 By the end of 1941, eleven men, at least six of them nonwhite, had died in Colorado’s lethal chamber.