While Wellman was struggling to save his own life, another black North Carolina man, George Peele, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death despite his stubborn pleas of innocence and the shaky evidence against him. Peele insisted that the police had extracted a false confession from him when he was drunk, but his attorney failed to file a brief on his behalf. At the time, some capital appeals were dismissed because the court had failed to prepare a trial transcript, and this sealed his fate. And so, on October 10, Peele “appeared thoroughly unnerved as he was led into the gas chamber.” He died still insisting he hadn’t committed the crime.12
Ideas based on eugenics continued to exert a significant influence on the administration of American justice, as reflected in the race, ethnicity, and mental status of the accused, as well as the eugenic approaches of segregation, exclusion, and execution by lethal gas. Besides skin color, “feeblemindedness” was another factor that sometimes contributed to suspects being executed. Although North Carolina and other states had laws on their books prohibiting the punishment of the “insane,” the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t held that executing a mentally incompetent person violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Mental incompetence was not considered a mitigating factor. In fact, in 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, had upheld forcible sterilization of the feebleminded, with Justice Oliver W. Holmes declaring in his famous opinion, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”13 Being labeled “feebleminded” had implications beyond just involuntary sterilization. Neither legislators nor the courts exempted persons of low intelligence from the death penalty. On the contrary, instead of disqualifying such persons from receiving a capital sentence, many Americans still believed that “feebleminded” criminals should be put to death. John Sullivan, another severely mentally retarded prisoner whom Colorado put to death, was just one example.14 Police found it much easier to extract a confession from mentally handicapped persons, and prosecutors noticed that they also were far less likely to defend themselves.
By the early 1940s gender was also becoming less of a disqualifying factor for execution in the United States. Until that point, women had rarely been put to death, and no female had ever been gassed. But in November of 1941 a new milestone was established in California when an American gas chamber received its first woman—Mrs. Ethel Leta Juanita Spinelli, a fifty-two-year-old grandmother known as “The Duchess,” said to be the leader of a robbery gang, who had been convicted of murder. Police depicted her as a professional criminal, saying she could throw a knife to pin a poker chip at fifteen paces, and prosecutors demanded her execution. Yet convicts at San Quentin were repulsed by the notion of a woman being put to death; many of them signed a petition protesting her execution, and they even offered to draw straws among themselves to select a replacement. But after the state and federal courts swiftly denied Spinelli’s attorneys’ applications for a writ of habeas corpus, and the governor refused to grant her clemency, the state went ahead with her execution the day after Thanksgiving. A news photographer snapped a picture of the smiling Italian-American woman holding a crucifix, and it went out on the international wire. When her time came, the authorities strapped the woman into the death chair with her back to the crowd of more than one hundred witnesses. Under her green prison smock she carried faded snapshots of her daughter, “Gypsy,” her two young sons, and her infant grandson. A week later, two of Spinelli’s alleged associates were also put to death. The chief witness against them remained in an insane asylum.15
By the end of 1941, San Quentin’s chamber had claimed twenty-four lives, twenty-two of them whites, which at the time put it second in the nation behind North Carolina in total gassings. Before the year was over, North Carolina followed California by executing its first woman, Rosanna Phillips, who was black. During the early 1940s the age range of those sent to the gas chamber was also stretched. In June 1941 Colorado executed someone who was seventy-six years old, and in 1942 and 1944 Oregon and Nevada tied the record for youngest person executed by dispatching a seventeen-year-old.16 In 1942, Arizona matched an earlier North Carolina milestone from 1938 when it executed three persons (all of them black) on the same day. In 1944, the first lethal gas execution of a federal prisoner took place when Wyoming put to death Henry Ruhl at Rawlins Penitentiary for the crime of murder on a federal reservation. (The federal government lacked its own lethal gas execution apparatus.)
The demise of Hungarian immigrant Leslie Gireth at San Quentin on January 22, 1943, in some ways exemplified the ideal in American gas chamber executions of that era. Convicted of murdering his former jewelry store employee during an adulterous affair, Gireth later expressed remorse, pleaded guilty, refused to appeal his sentence, and left Warden Clinton T. Duffy (Holohan’s former assistant) a warm letter saying, “Thank you so much for everything,” as he settled comfortably into the death chair.17 There was no resistance and no outcry.
In summary, the technology of gas chamber executions had been fairly well established in the United States by 1940, and the following decade saw some new milestones to America’s gas chamber history. By and large, however, the nation’s lethal gas executions went on as before, documented in news accounts but not viewed as a pressing social issue. But that was about to change because of what was happening in Europe.
For one thing, America’s entry into the war renewed many citizens’ fears about chemical warfare. Accounts circulated that Japanese and Italian military commanders had used poison gases on the battlefield and against civilians, and there was no doubt that the Germans would resort to doing so again if it suited their interests; everyone was sure the enemy had worked in their secret laboratories to devise even more diabolical gases and had probably stockpiled massive quantities of deadly chemicals for use when the time was right. The Americans’ greatest consolation was that geography would likely protect them from possible gas assault at home.
“Why have the Germans not used it?” Winston Churchill growled in a secret memorandum. “Not certainly out of moral scruples or affection for us…. [T]he only reason they have not used it against us is that they fear the retaliation. What is to their detriment is to our advantage.”18
Like the British, the U.S. Army secretly revived its chemical warfare program during the war, making gas masks, training soldiers and civilians, and preparing response plans. The government also conducted extensive research that included large-scale experimentation on human subjects, mostly U.S. military personnel and convicts. Some of the tests exposed about sixty thousand members of the U.S. armed forces to lewisite and mustard gas. Decades later a congressional inquiry would report: “Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical follow-up after their participation in the research… [and] some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents, and family doctors.”
One seventeen-year-old sailor, Nathan Schnurman, participated in the testing of gas masks and clothing while he was locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite. Schnurman was not allowed to leave the chamber even after he became violently ill and passed out. “What happened after that, I don’t know,” he later recalled. “I may only assume, when I was removed from the chamber, it was presumed I was already dead.” At least four thousand of the army’s guinea pigs were Seventh-day Adventists, conscientious objectors who were especially prized as research subjects because they didn’t drink, smoke, or engage in other harmful behaviors.19 The army also continued to utilize gas-chamber drills as part of its required basic training for new recruits.