Soon after that, Bruce remained in full view of Gray as he pulled the lever, which made a creaking metallic sound as it released the pellets into the sulfuric acid bath beneath the wire-mesh chair. The cyanide landed with a plop and the gas started to rise in an eerie cloud. Once he was certain that the poison had been unleashed, the executioner turned his back and lit up a Lucky Strike.10
Witnesses noticed that Gray appeared to inhale deeply and then moaned. His body jerked violently at the black leather straps binding his arms, chest, and legs. His head slumped forward and then pitched backward several times, causing him to bang his head against the pole so violently that the chamber seemed to shake from the impact. According to one witness, United Press International reporter Daniel Lohwasser, four minutes into the execution, “It was obvious that Mr. Gray was in excruciating pain.”11
Eight minutes into the execution, when Gray was still smashing his head on the metal pole behind him, a prison official sternly ordered all the witnesses to leave the area. “Gentlemen of the press,” the deputy warden commanded, “that was the pre-agreed-upon signal for witnesses to leave the room.”
“He hasn’t been pronounced dead, has he?” one journalist asked.
“No questions,” said the official.12
Gray’s lawyer also protested, but he, too, was ordered to leave. Thirteen years later, Lohwasser, a former Vietnam combat veteran, would state, “The images of Jimmy Lee Gray searching the room with his eyes, straining to escape the gas, and smashing his head against the pole, are permanently burned into my memory. These images are far more cruel, barbaric, and demoralizing than any other violent and gruesome acts that I have witnessed.”13
Few Americans took note of Mississippi’s resumption of executions, or if they did, they cared little about the child killer Jimmy Lee Gray. In December 1984 a Gallup poll found that 72 percent of all Americans supported the death penalty for murder, but 56 percent favored lethal injection as the preferred method of execution, compared to 16 percent for the gas chamber and only 6 percent for the electric chair.
One by one, states had backed away from the continued use of the gas chamber, usually substituting lethal injection instead. New Mexico switched to lethal injection in 1979, and in 1983 Nevada, the pioneer in lethal gas, also moved to the needle. After a state court had declared Oregon’s capital punishment statute unconstitutional in 1981, the state was without any execution law for three years. In the wake of Gray’s botched execution, Mississippi turned away from the gas chamber, adopting lethal injection in 1984 for cases after the act’s effective date, as did Wyoming—although such an approach meant that the gas chamber was still in force for older cases.
In early 1984 North Carolina, which had used the gas chamber more times than any other state except for California, debated whether to keep it. Representative John W. Varner, a physician, said on the house floor, “There’s no doubt about it. Death in a gas chamber is a horrible death. You’re strapped in a little room. For many minutes, not a few, he’s struggling, trying to breathe and all he can breathe is gas.” Although Varner’s comments about asphyxiation were accurate, he then added a plug for lethal injection that would later become much more controversiaclass="underline" “With lethal injection, he feels no pain. It’s like going into an operating room and going to sleep. He passes away with no struggle.”
In the end, North Carolina authorized the use of lethal gas or lethal injection at the condemned’s election, with lethal gas used if the condemned failed to choose a method. Rhode Island abandoned not only its gas chamber but abolished the death penalty in 1984. Colorado abandoned lethal gas in 1987. Missouri in 1988 began to offer a choice: lethal gas or lethal injection.14
At about the same time that the Supreme Court denied Jimmy Lee Gray’s final stay of execution, in September 1983, the Journal of Historical Review, a neo-Nazi Holocaust-denial journal published by the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in Newport Beach, California, published a noteworthy article. In 1979 the IHR had begun offering a reward of $50,000 for verifiable “proof that gas chambers for the purpose of killing human beings existed at or in Auschwitz.” In 1983 the journal published “Zyklon B, Auschwitz, and the Trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch,” written by William B. Lindsey. Although Lindsey did not publicize the fact at the time, he was a chemist with a Ph.D. from Indiana University who worked as a research chemist for DuPont. (He worked there from 1952 to 1985.) Not only was Lindsey a Holocaust denier who disclaimed that Zyklon-B had ever been used to carry out executions at Auschwitz, but he also contended that convicted German war criminal Dr. Bruno Tesch and his prokurist Karl Weinbacher were unfairly convicted and hanged after the Allies had dissolved Germany’s “legitimate” (Nazi) government. His detailed study of Zyklon-B also failed to mention that his longtime employer, DuPont, had also furnished chemicals used in U.S. gassings.15
The IHR’s $50,000 reward (and an additional $40,000) was eventually paid in 1985 to Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein of Huntington Beach, California, who had sued the IHR for breach of contract for initially ignoring his evidence (a signed testimony of his experiences in Auschwitz). As a result of Mermelstein’s case, on August 5, 1985, Judge Robert A. Wenke of the Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles declared the Holocaust an indisputable legal fact and ordered the defendants to apologize, which they did.16 The IHR, however, has continued to espouse pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying positions.
In February of 1985 Dr. Lindsey testified in the first “false news” trial of Ernst Zündel in Canada, where he rejected the claim that masses of prisoners had been gassed to death at Auschwitz. “I have come to the conclusion that no one was willfully or purposefully killed with Zyklon-B [hydrogen cyanide] in this manner,” he testified. “I consider it absolutely impossible.” The trial ended with Zündel’s conviction and sentencing to fifteen months in prison. It also ended Dr. Lindsey’s tenure at DuPont.17
The legal struggles over America’s use of lethal gas for executions continued in states that had not completely abandoned the gas chamber. Mississippi was one of the fiercest battlegrounds. In 1979 Edward Earl Johnson, a poor black youngster from Leake County, had been charged with killing a white police officer and assaulting an elderly white woman. Prior to his arrest the eighteen-year-old had never been in trouble with the police. His lawyers put up scant defense before he was convicted, after which he spent eight years in a windowless cell on death row. Although the Catholic Church and others advocated on his behalf, Johnson still faced execution by gas due to the pre-1984 date of his conviction. With only three weeks to go until Johnson’s scheduled gassing, a new appeals attorney finally joined the case. Clive Stafford Smith was a twenty-eight-year-old Englishman who had come to Atlanta to work for the Southern Prisoners’ Defense Committee with such famous capital defenders as Millard Farmer and Stephen Bright, and he was determined to try to stop the youth’s execution.
At the time, Mississippi prisons had a relatively open media policy, and the filmmaker Paul Hamann had decided to focus a television documentary on Johnson because his was the next scheduled execution. Hamann received permission to film Johnson, his family, and his lawyer as the case reached its conclusion. The resulting ninety-minute documentary, Fourteen Days in May, produced for the BBC, would be shown in the United States on HBO, becoming the only documentary film released to the public showing the last-minute machinations surrounding a lethal gas execution. Smith kept fighting for his client until the end—and Johnson continued to deny that he had killed the policeman—but he was executed on May 26, 1987.18