A few facts about the electric chair

In 1889, the American government came to the conclusion that death by hanging is not humane. So they set up a special Commission to select a different, not a painful kind of devitalization of the sentence. The proposal came from Thomas Edison, who by that time was already quite famous and successful scientists and business people. He offered to kill criminals by an electric current.









After a series of experiments with cats and dogs, was adopted the Law "about electric execution." William Kemmler — the world's first prisoner executed in the electric chair. In the next ten years, this form of punishment adopted in more than ten States. For a hundred years, in this way deprived of life more than 4.3 thousand people.

Themselves sentenced to the electric chair called “yellow Mama” or “old smokehouse”. Man strapped to a special metal stool and is passed through an alternating current with a voltage of 2500 V and a current of 5 A in for several minutes. Despite the propaganda painless death, sometimes a person begins to smoke, asparaginase under him during the execution.









After 1976 the United States decided to use lethal injections. The primary motivation for this decision was that the “yellow Mama” is too expensive to operate. To date, the electric chair can be used in 13 States, more than that the prisoner be given the choice of how to execute him.



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