COVER STORY
Death Row (pop. 1,137) may soon lose a lot more residents to the executioner
The chair is bolted to the floor near the back of a 12-ft. by 18-ft. room. You sit on a seat of cracked rubber secured by rows of copper tacks. Your ankles are strapped into half-moon-shaped foot cuffs lined with canvas. A 2-in.-wide greasy leather belt with 28 buckle holes and worn grooves where it has been pulled very tight many times is secured around your waist just above the hips. A cool metal cone encircles your head. You are now only moments away from death.
But you still have a few seconds left. Time becomes stretched to the outermost limits. To your right you see the mahogany floor divider that separates four brown church-type pews from the rest of the room. They look odd in this beige Zen-like chamber. There is another door at the back through which the witnesses arrive and sit in the pews. You stare up at two groups of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. They are on. The paint on the ceiling is peeling.
You fit in neat and snug. Behind the chair's back leg on your right is a cable wrapped in gray tape. It will sluice the electrical current to three other wires: two going to each of your feet, and the third to the cone on top of your head. The room is very quiet. During your brief walk here, you looked over your shoulder and saw early morning light creeping over the Berkshire Hills. Then into this silent tomb.
The air vent above your head in the ceiling begins to hum. This means the executioner has turned on the fan to suck up the smell of burning flesh. There is little time left. On your right you can see the waisthigh, one-way mirror in the wall. Behind the mirror is the executioner, standing before a gray marble control panel with gauges, switches and a foot-long lever of wood and metal at hip level.
The executioner will pull this lever four times. Each time 2,000 volts will course through your body, making your eyeballs first bulge, then burst, and then broiling your brains . . .
That big old mahogany armchair is practically antique, but it still works. First used in 1890, it is the world's oldest and most prodigious electric chair: 695 convicted men and women died in its grip, nearly one a month for the better part of a century. For most of those years it was housed at Sing Sing, contributing to that place's hellhole notoriety. Now it squats on the fourth floor of Green Haven prison in New York.
But the state has killed no one since the summer of 1963, when Eddie Lee Mays was electrocuted at Sing Sing. And for some time to come, this prototypical electric chair with the flip nickname ("Old Sparky") seems likely to remain nothing more than a grim curiosity. The state's new Governor, Mario Cuomo, promises to veto any capital-punishment statute the New York legislature passes, just as his predecessor did every chance he got.
But New York is not typical of these angry tunes. The country's decade-long moratorium on capital punishment ended in 1977 when Gary Gilmore dared Utah to shoot him and, six years ago this week, Utah obliged. Five men have been executed since. One shared Gilmore's flashy passion for martyrdom: Jesse Bishop, who gunned down a newlywed during a casino holdup, practically volunteered for Nevada's gas chamber. Three were electrocuted: John Spenkelink in Florida, for