TENNESSEE BELIEVE IT HAS FOUND A GREAT SOLUTION, " BRING BACK ELECTRIC CHAIR", IT'S GETTING PRETTY HARD TO KILL A DEATH ROW INMATE THESE DAYS.

 Tennessee believes it has found a great solution: "Bring back electric chair". it's getting pretty hard to kill a death row inmate these days. 

“I think the legislature felt very strongly we needed to have some sort of backup (electric chair) in case the drugs for the lethal injection weren't available,”

Tennessee Is Bringing Back the Electric Chair, 

It’s getting pretty hard to kill a death row inmate these days.

 Faced with a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs, states have been scrambling to figure out how to keep executing prisoners without creating more controversy about their methods of capital punishment. 

Tennessee believes it has found a great solution: Bring back Ole' Sparky.

On Thursday night, Republican Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill into law that allows the state to electrocute inmates if prison officials can’t get their hands on lethal injection drugs.

 The move made Tennessee the first state to bring back the electric chair without offering death row prisoners another option for execution.

 “I think the legislature felt very strongly we needed to have some sort of backup in case the drugs for the lethal injection weren't available,” Haslam said on Friday.

The law, which was overwhelmingly passed by state lawmakers, comes amid mounting questions about the humanity and effectiveness of lethal injection, the preferred method of execution for all 32 states that still use capital punishment.

 But the drought of lethal injection drugs has forced state officials to experiment with untested lethal cocktails obtained through shady, back-alley transactions.

 The results are often disastrous, as we saw with the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma last month.

As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump points out, the use of the electric chair isn't exactly new—it was one of the more common methods of execution in the US for most of the 20th century. 

Seven other states still offer electrocution as an option for inmates, and it was most recently used in January 2013 to execute a death row inmate in Virginia.

Of course, there is a reason that most states retired the electric chair: Electrocution is a messy, gruesome way to kill someone. 

“Basically, the prisoner is mutilated,” said Deborah W. Denno, a Fordham University law professor who specializes in execution methods.

 Curious to know what fate could be in store for the 74 inmates still on death row in Tennessee, I asked Denno to explain how the electric chair works.

The process starts, she said, by shaving the prisoner’s head and part of the leg, usually near the ankle, reducing the body's resistance to the electricity.

 Next, the prisoner is typically strapped to the chair across the chest and legs, and then a metal skullcap with electrodes —“kind of like a yarmulke,” Denno explained—is put on the prisoner’s head with a moistened sponge.

 The executioners put a hood over the prisoner, and then they flip the switch.

How the prisoner actually dies still isn’t totally clear, according to Denno’s research, but electric-chair deaths are some sort of combination of asphyxiation and cardiac arrest, and the nervous system is usually paralyzed.

 The body tenses up—sometimes violently—and inmates often defecate. Smoke and steam rise out of the body probably because the inmate’s blood is boiling.

 The inmate's temperature become so hot, flesh falls off if someone touches the body, and the inmate usually receives third and fourth-degree burns under the electrode cap.

 I asked Denno if the eyeballs pop out. “Sometimes the eyeballs can pop out,” she said.

 The body can also bleed because of the pressure of the expanding tissue. Denno said, “It’s horrible, but it’s really like the body is cooking.”

Thanks for reading, leave your thought in the comment section below.