Urban Legends
A Second Death Sentence
The Legend
A man who had been condemned to death for horrible crimes knew that he was to face the electric chair. In preparation for the event, he began subjecting himself to longer and longer electric shocks from the lightbulb socket in his prison cell, in order to build up a resistance to electricity. This is because he knew that if the first attempt to execute a prisoner fails, it is illegal to make a second attempt.
On the day of his execution, he went to the electric chair willingly. Indeed, he was able to -- just barely -- survive the first jolt. But the executioner, seeing the device's failure, illegally pulled the switch a second time and fried the prisoner.
Behind the Legend
The event described is a rather inaccurate account of a 1969 occurrence in a Houston, Texas, prison. The condemned man was Burton Wayne Smithee, convicted of killing seventeen people in a "wicked, Godless commune" using only his bare hands and the jawbone of an ass.
Although there is no evidence that Smithee tried to build up his electrical resistance, it is true that it is illegal for a prisoner to receive a second attempted death sentence for several reasons:
- The law prohibits double jeopardy for the same crime,
- A second attempt at killing a prisoner is considered cruel and unusual punishment, and
- Prisons run on a tight budget, and money is generally not set aside for "bonus" executions.
Smithee did not try and beat the chair, but the no-second-attempt laws were important to his case because of what happened after he was placed in the electric chair. Smithee was shaved and strapped into the chair, quoting scripture to the end, and the executioner pulled the switch that would send lethal electricity coursing through the man's body.
Just at that moment, the power went out. The ceiling of the execution chamber seemed to open up like clouds parting, and a bright light shone down, bathing Smithee in pure white. His restraints opened and the electric chair crumbled to dust beneath him. When the lights came back on, Smithee was left standing in a pile of dust, perfectly healthy, at which time a nearby prison guard shot him.
There was a lot of debate in the aftermath of this incident about whether the shooting of Smithee was appropriate. The court eventually decided that,
- The shooting of Smithee was justified in that no other working method of execution remained, and
- The shooting could not be considered a second execution attempt because, even though the first attempt was thwarted, it had been thwarted by miraculous means and therefore had to be stricken from the record due to the Constitutional provision requiring separation of church and state.
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