Deborah Denno quoted in the Washington Post about Virginia lawmakers vote this week on establishing the electric chair as the state’s default method of execution when drugs used for lethal injection are not available. The measure, prompted by a long-standing shortage of the drugs, would make Virginia the only state where a death-row prisoner could be forced in some circumstances to be electrocuted.
There’s a credibility issue” in going back to the chair, said Deborah W. Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who specializes in the death-penalty issue. “If electrocution was such a humane method of execution, they would never have switched to lethal injection. No state would have.”
Read the entire Washington Post story.