Fordham University's In Focus features law prof Deborah Denno, a leading scholar of lethal injection studies, "Legal Scholar’s Research Uncovers ‘Cruel and Unusual’ Nature of Administering Lethal Injection."
The name William Kemmler doesn’t ring a bell for most people. Kemmler, a New Yorker, was the first inmate in the nation to be put to death in the electric chair. The year was 1890.
According to some of those who witnessed the execution, Kemmler’s body caught fire from the two massive jolts of electrical current, revolting many in the room and leading George Westinghouse to comment that it would have been more humane to have killed him with an axe.
As a law clerk in 1990, Deborah Denno, Ph.D., the Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law, was fascinated with the details of the gruesome case as it applied to the Eighth Amendment, known as the cruel and unusual punishment clause. The amendment protects prisoners from punishments characterized as “patently unnecessary,” or “degrading to human dignity.”
“[Kemmler] was basically butchered,” said Denno, who at the time was doing research on the history of the Eighth Amendment. “And I found out that inmate electrocution, in 1990, wasn’t that much different than it was in 1890. That started to bother me and the issue suddenly became huge for me.”
Denno’s research on Kemmler and the nation’s use of electrocution throughout the 20th century led to an article, published in the William and Mary Review of Law in 1994, in which she argued that electrocutions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. The article, “Is Electrocution an Unconstitutional Method of Execution? The Engineering of Death Over the Century,” drew the attention of defense attorneys for its detailed research and its application of the Eighth Amendment.
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