I’ve been thinking a lot about Willie Francis, who was the only person to walk away from the electric chair alive.
Willie was a sixteen-year-old black child, arrested for killing a white drugstore owner in St. Martinville, Louisiana, in 1945. His court-appointed lawyer put up no defense, called no witnesses and raised not a single objection during the trial, and the all-white jury took just fifteen minutes to deliver their verdict of guilty.
Before his execution, Willie was locked up in the Iberia Parish Jail, because the jail in St. Martinville had no locks on the door and there was a danger the locals might drag him out and kill him.
The day of Willie’s execution, a portable electric chair, nicknamed ‘Gruesome Gertie’, was delivered to the St. Martinville Jail and carried up two flights of stairs. The local white townsfolk gathered outside, many climbing trees to perch on the fence around the jail to get a glimpse as Willie Francis was brought to the jail.
But the crowd was to be disappointed: after being strapped in the chair and the electric current had been sent through his body, Willie didn’t die. Instead, he cried out “Let me breathe.” To which Captain Ephie Foster, one of the guards, replied, “You’re not supposed to breathe.”
An outcry
The officials were forced to unstrap Willie and ferry him back to the Iberia Parish lockup. They deemed a second attempt that day would be unseemly.
Willie’s terrible experience created a public outcry across the nation. His new lawyer appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court, saying that a second execution attempt would be both double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court was unmoved.
And so, a year and a week later, Willie was strapped once more into the chair. This time, the current did its job.
Willie Francis in prison, between his first and second execution.
A throughline
Sister Helen Prejean wrote about Willie Francis in Dead Man Walking. In the graphic version, we devote two full spreads—four pages—to his story.
In creating the graphic book, we wanted to underscore two themes: family and racism.
Dead Man Walking revolves around Helen’s experience with two condemned men, both white, and their victims, also white. While she delves deeply into the racism that fueled the death penalty and the justice system, we felt that, from our vantage point some forty years later, we had a chance to explore the role of racism more fully and to examine what had remained the same and what, if anything, had changed.
So, haunting Catherine Anyango Grünewald’s illustrations that depict events from the 1980s are images from our much more recent past . We call these ‘future echoes’.
Today, what set me thinking about Willie Francis is that this week an opera about Eric Garner is premiering at the Lincoln Center’s Summer Festival. The opera is called ‘The Ritual of Breath is the Rite to Exist.’
Eric Garner’s last words, as he struggled in a police officer’s chokehold, were “I can’t breathe.”
Unknown individuals
While Willie Francis was the only person to survive an attempted execution by electric chair, such a fate is more common when the newer, ‘more humane’ lethal injection protocol is used.
Since 2009, prison staff have been unable to successfully perform an execution using lethal drugs on six occasions. Of the six men who went through this experience, three subsequently died on death row due to illness, while three remain on death row. The list below indicates how long prison officials attempted to set IV lines before finally giving up:
- Romell Broome - Ohio, 2009 - 2 hours
- Alva Campbell - Ohio, 2017 - at least 80 minutes
- Doyle Hamm - Alabama, 2018 - 2 1/2 hours
- Alan Miller - Alabama, 2022 - 90 minutes
- Kenneth Smith - Alabama, 2022 - 3 hours 21 minutes (the first 2 hours, Mr. Smith waited, strapped to the gurney, before prison officials attempted to insert IV lines)
- Thomas Creech - Idaho, 2024 - 58 minutes
As Thomas Creech’s lawyers said after his failed execution attempt, “This is what happens when unknown individuals with unknown training are assigned to carry out an execution.”
[As a side note, Kenneth Smith’s jury voted 11-1 for a life sentence. The judge in Alabama, one of the few jurisdictions that allowed for a judicial override, rejected that verdict and sentenced him to death.]
The iceberg
Failed executions are those where the condemned person leaves the execution chamber alive after an execution has been attempted. They are fairly rare occurrences.
Botched executions, on the other hand, are far more common.
A botched execution is one in which the execution succeeds in its goal of killing the person, but the process is flawed or has unintended consequences, such as a person catching on fire when electrocuted, or someone dying from strangulation instead of having their neck broken during a hanging.
Executions carried out by lethal injection are by far the most commonly botched form of execution. Of the 8,776 executions performed in the United States between 1890 and 2010, 276 were botched. The botch rate for different methods of execution were:
Firing Squad - <1%
Electrocution - 1.92%
Hanging - 3.12%
Lethal Gas - 5.4%
Lethal Injection - 7.12%
In recent years, the rate of botched executions by lethal injection has risen dramatically, due to a variety of factors, including difficulties with sourcing drugs, reliance on poorly regulated compounding pharmacies, and the reluctance of trained medical staff to participate in executions. In 2023, an astounding 37% of executions by lethal injection were botched.