Scott Christianson writes, "The United States' first gas-chamber execution occured in Carson City on February 8, 1924," for the November/December issue of Nevada Magazine.
Early one chilly Friday morning, February 8, 1924, national attention briefly focused on the hard-rock state prison at Carson City.
In the institution’s former barbershop, guards nervously strapped a frightened Chinese convict into a crude wooden chair and exited the chamber. Outside the building, dozens of curious witnesses peered through the fogged windows in order to catch a glimpse of what was about to happen.
Although the state’s population numbered less than 80,000, Nevada’s reputation as a social laboratory was not limited to quickie divorce and gambling.
Gee Jon, 29, was slated to become the first convicted murderer to be put to death under Nevada’s newly enacted Humane Execution Law and the first person in the world to be legally executed by lethal gas.
Implemented as an alternative to grisly hanging, gassing was supposed to end life quickly and painlessly. Its advocates included leaders of the chemical industry, the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, proponents of eugenics (the pseudo-science of racial purification), and progressive reformers.
And:
In 1994, a federal district court found that lethal-gas execution violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling was upheld.
The gas chambers at Carson City and other American prisons were eventually converted to lethal injection chambers or shut down altogether. What had originally been intended as a humane and progressive reform was abandoned 75 years after it was introduced.
Today, Jon’s unmarked grave lies behind the prison wall among the rocky dirt and sagebrush–a reminder of one of Nevada’s thornier milestones in 20th-century history.
There's more in Christianson's book, The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber, published earlier this year; earlier coverage begins here.
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