For the first time in five years in the US, one inmate has been executed on the electric chair. The death sentence for 63-year-old Edmund Zagorski, convicted of double homicide, was executed yesterday in a high-security prison in Nashville, Tennessee, according to the authorities. Zagorski himself had preferred the electric chair of lethal injection.
Zagorski had been convicted of killing two men in 1983. He had lured them to a forest area promising to sell them marijuana. Actually, he should have been executed in October with lethal injection. However, the execution was suspended shortly after Zagorski demanded that he be executed with the electric chair instead. His lawyers argued that lethal injection would threaten him for ten to 18 minutes – with the electric chair only 15 to 30 seconds.
The poison cocktails used for executions in the United States are criticized because the contained narcotic midazolam does not appear to be strong enough to avoid the pain of the death row.
