Nevada hadn’t used its gas chamber for eighteen years, and those assigned to carry out the execution weren’t entirely confident about their ability to pull it off without a problem. Some of them warned the witnesses that if they smelled anything “funny,” they should hold their breath and exit the chamber quickly. In the end, the chamber did not leak, but one eyewitness, the TV reporter Tad Dunbar, later said, “I was surprised to see that death did not appear to come quickly or painlessly under that method of execution.”5 Such wrinkles didn’t stop other states from going forward with executions by whatever means they had on their statute books, including lethal gas. But the gas chamber was no longer touted as a “humane” method of execution.
The tiny platoon of anti–death penalty lawyers kept fighting an unrelenting battle against overwhelming odds, and it wasn’t until September 1983 that the next gas execution became imminent. It happened in Mississippi, a state notorious for its impoverished capital defense.
Jimmy Lee Gray, a thirty-four-year-old former computer operator who had been on parole for killing his childhood sweetheart, stood convicted of abducting a three-year-old girl, carrying her to a remote area, sexually molesting her, suffocating her in a muddy ditch, and throwing her body into a stream. Gray, not surprisingly, did not engender much public sympathy. In the seven years before his execution, judicial review of the case had been undertaken eighty-two times by twenty-six different state and federal judges. One of his latest arguments was to try to convince the courts that execution by lethal gas amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
On September 1 the U.S. Supreme Court denied Gray’s request for a stay by a 5–3 vote. “This case illustrates a recent pattern of calculated efforts to frustrate valid judgments after painstaking judicial review over a number of years,” Chief Justice Warren Burger declared. “At some point, there must be finality.”6 However, Justice Thurgood Marshall, with whom Justice Brennan concurred, noted in his dissent that “Petitioner argues that the method by which the state of Mississippi plans to execute him—exposure to cyanide gas—constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. In support of that claim, he submitted to the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi numerous affidavits that described in graphic and horrifying detail the manner in which death is induced through this procedure.” In one of these declarations, Dr. Richard Traystman, director of the Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine Research Laboratories at Johns Hopkins Medical School, had described the gassing process as follows:
Very simply, cyanide gas blocks the utilization of the oxygen in the body’s cells…. Gradually, depending on the rate and volume of inspiration, and on the concentration of the cyanide that is inhaled, the person exposed to cyanide gas will become anoxic. This is a condition defined by no oxygen. Death will follow through asphyxiation, when the heart and brain cease to receive oxygen.
The hypoxic state can continue for several minutes after the cyanide gas is released in the execution chamber. The person exposed to this gas remains conscious for a period of time, in some cases for several minutes, again depending on the rate and volume of the gas that is inhaled. During this time, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety. The pain begins immediately, and is felt in the arms, shoulders, back, and chest. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially, the heart is being deprived of oxygen. The severity of the pain varies directly with the diminishing oxygen reaching the tissues.
The agitation and anxiety a person experiences in the hypoxic state will stimulate the autonomic nervous system…. [The person]… may begin to drool, urinate, defecate, or vomit. There will be muscular contractions. These responses can occur both while the person is conscious, or when he becomes unconscious.
When the anoxia sets in, the brain remains alive for from two to five minutes. The heart will continue to beat for a period of time after that, perhaps five to seven minutes, or longer, though at a very low cardiac output. Death can occur ten to twelve minutes after the gas is released in the chamber.
Dr. Traystman further testified that the execution by lethal gas is sufficiently painful that it is disfavored in the scientific community as a method of putting animals to sleep. “We would not use asphyxiation, by cyanide gas or by any other substance, in our laboratory to kill animals that have been used in experiments—nor would most medical research laboratories in this country use it.” He continued:
In my view, if the lethal-gas method operates in the manner described by petitioner, the Court of Appeals clearly erred in ruling that the method is not “cruel” under “present jurisprudential standards.” The Eighth Amendment proscribes “punishments which are incompatible with ‘the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.’”7
Gray was known to have become a born-again Christian and taken up writing poetry while on death row. The night before his scheduled execution, he had a final meal of Mexican food, strawberries, and milk. About thirty-five minutes before his final appointment, he was taken from his cell in a maximum-security unit to the “last night room,” a windowless cubicle that adjoins the death chamber, where he received services from several ministers and prepared to meet his maker. Outside the prison, several dozen members of the Mississippi Coalition Against the Death Penalty continued to chant for the governor to grant clemency while the mosquitoes drank their blood. “I’m glad it’s happening,” said Richard A. Scales Jr., the father of the slain girl, Deressa Jean. “It should have happened years ago.”8
Ivan Solotaroff, the journalist who published The Last Face You’ll Ever See (2001), a vivid account of recent executions in Mississippi, described the six-sided death chamber as “smaller than one would think, roughly four feet square and ten feet high. Almost beautiful, if one is mechanically inclined, it’s also extremely alien looking, like an antique, six-sided diving bell someone painted gray, slathered with petroleum jelly, and jammed into a metal wall that divides two of the three rooms that form the death house.” (The heavy coating of Vaseline on the doorway’s rubber gaskets was intended to prevent any cracking that might allow gas to escape from the seal once the door was shut.) The chamber’s waist-high, wire-reinforced, tinted green windows were embedded on five of the hexagon’s sides, offering a close view of the proceedings. Three windows were for the witnesses, one was for the two physicians who would monitor Gray’s heartbeat with an EKG machine and a stethoscope, and the last, located to the left of the chamber’s heavy door, was for the executioner.9
At 12:01 A.M. the condemned, dressed in a red jump suit, was brought into the death chamber. Jimmy Lee Gray’s face was ashen. Guards strapped his arms and legs to the chair and bound his head to a metal pole behind him. The place was muggy, hot, and reeked of bug spray. Mississippi’s official executioner, T. Berry Bruce, was a school custodian who had handled every one of the state’s thirty-two gassings at the prison since Parchman’s chamber was built in 1954, and he made it his practice never to communicate with the condemned. Bruce received a go-ahead knock on his door, indicating there would be no further reprieve. A voice quickly read the death warrant, and the sheriff announced, “Let us begin.”