At the time, most makers of American public opinion also backed the country’s continued use of the gas chamber. In one ruling of 1953, the California Supreme Court claimed, after examining fifteen years of San Quentin’s death house medical records, that the gas chamber met “contemporary scientific standards,” adding, “For many years, animals have been put to death painlessly by the administration of poison gas.”8 In addition, many prominent writers in American law and criminology still endorsed lethal gas as the most humane execution option. In a typical statement from that period, the liberal professors Harry Elmer Barnes and Negley K. Teeters proclaimed in their popular textbook New Horizons in Criminology (1954):
Lethal gas is certainly painless. It is a physically pleasant form of meeting death, and humanitarian sentiment would recommend it as a universal method of execution (until capital punishment is abolished). But even this method is revolting to many who are by profession somewhat inured to seeing men die at the hands of the state. The argument is not that gas is painful to the condemned men but that the spectacle of gradual expiration is “torture to the spectators.”9
Such support remained so strong that for a decade or so after the end of World War II the states using lethal gas continued to put prisoners to death with it, albeit usually at a slower pace than before the war. At first, things seemed to go on as before. Indeed, on October 3, 1947, North Carolina carried out its first quintuple gas-chamber execution, putting to death three blacks and two whites (one of them for first-degree burglary) after one of the condemned had tried to prevent his execution by jamming his cell door lock with an ice cream spoon. A few weeks later, on Halloween, the state carried out a quadruple gassing of four black men.
But the pace of executions was slowing. North Carolina’s tally of 111 gassings in the 1940s dropped to only eighteen in the 1950s, signaling a radical turnaround. Colorado’s total plummeted from twenty-two to three, Missouri went from fourteen to nine, and California dropped from eighty-one to seventy-three.
The fact that the number of states employing lethal gas continued to expand struck many observers as a sign of progress, not a cause for alarm. Oklahoma passed a law in 1951 providing for electrocution as the official method of execution until a gas chamber was built, but no gas unit was ever constructed.10
Developments in Mississippi were more complicated. When Mississippi abandoned its portable electric chair for gas in 1954, many progressives initially viewed it as a major step forward, provided that the move did not encourage a return to lynching. There was good reason to worry that it might. Faced with the start of the civil rights movement, white supremacists had gone on the warpath. Both the Ku Klux Klan and many local government officials vowed to defy that year’s landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education, as well as any other slights to white status. That summer the battered body of a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was found in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy fan tied to his neck, a victim of racial hatred. And Till was just the beginning.
It was in this tempestuous climate that Mississippi’s new gas chamber sprang forth. The state’s main prison was Parchman Penitentiary, a sprawling former slave plantation. In one of its cotton fields, convicts had been forced to build a bunker surrounded by guard towers and a razor-wire fence. Inside was a solitary confinement wing where troublesome convicts could be isolated and at times beaten, and next to that stood the small redbrick death house that resembled a gas station.11
Designed for Eaton Metal Products Company in Denver by Thomas Clyde Williams, Mississippi’s shiny new hexagonal execution chamber was equipped with one chair and made to kill one person per hour. As set forth in the patent, the inventor had endeavored “to provide a neat, compact mechanism which will humanely execute the criminal or criminals with the least possible delay and confusion, [and] which will allow quick entry after the execution without danger to the attendants.” There were separate rooms for the witnesses, warden, doctor, and executioner. One executioner controlled the whole operation, including the injection of the gas and the quick clearing of the chemicals and gas from the chamber afterward. According to the designer’s description, “While a specific form of the improvement has been described and illustrated herein,” the new version did not depart “from the spirit of the [original] invention.”12 Controls outside the chamber released cyanide pellets into a four-gallon stainless-steel container holding sulfuric acid. Two men were required to operate the chamber—one to serve as official executioner, tripping the controls to start the release of gas, and the other (his assistant) to manipulate the ventilating and neutralizing systems. Eaton’s production manager Gene Clark tested the new unit on site in January 1955. According to the company’s established routine, he made sure the unit was properly installed and later worked with the would-be executioner to test the chamber’s killing power on a pig.13
Three months later Mississippi began carrying out its first human gas-chamber executions at Parchman. Its first occupant, Gerald Gallego, was a white bank robber from Biloxi who had allegedly killed a constable trying to arrest him. Later he had slain a jailer by slitting his throat. Shortly before his death Gallego was described as a blasphemous killer, but at his execution he credited a local Baptist minister for bringing him “back to God.” Reverend Kermit Canterbury called the condemned man’s spiritual resurrection the “greatest conversion I’ve ever seen.” As Gallego went to meet his maker, a chorus of condemned men in C Tier could be heard singing, “Up Above There’s Heaven Bright.”
But when the executioner pulled his fatal lever, nothing happened: the pellets were stuck. The doomed man had to wait in his chair while his killer entered the chamber, fixed the problem, returned to his station, and pulled the lever again. This time the situation was even worse, for only a few of the pellets dropped into the acid, so that Gallego was only sickened, not killed. The executioner had to start from scratch, evacuating the chamber and allowing the gas to disperse and detoxify before he delivered a full load of enough fresh cyanide to ensure Gallego’s demise. Afterward the executioner donned vinyl gloves, a leather apron, and an oxygen mask, and he entered the chamber to dust down the corpse, running his gloved hands through the dead man’s hair and the folds of his clothes to ensure that no cyanide gas remained trapped to later cause problems at the funeral home.14
Mississippi continued its gassings at a brisk pace. The next day, a black man from Louisiana was put to death for mugging a white woman. In five years alone, from 1955 to 1959, Mississippi’s deadly chamber was the site of twenty executions, seventeen of them of black men. One of the rare white men executed, William Alvin Wetzel, was characterized as a “New York mobster” who had been trying to free his imprisoned brother. (Wetzel’s brother had recently been convicted of first-degree murder after killing a North Carolina policeman while he was at large after fleeing a New York mental hospital.)15 Unlike hangings and electrocutions, the new method seemed kind but potent as far as many Mississippians were concerned.
Maryland didn’t adopt lethal gas until 1955, and it carried out its first two gassings in that decade. Both involved black youths convicted of the robbery, rape, and murder of a white woman, giving the case a strong racial flavor.16 New Mexico decided in 1955 to substitute lethal gas for electrocution but did not in fact gas anyone until 1960.