At 2 A.M. on June 15, 1994, David Lawson was brought into the gas chamber wearing only white boxer shorts, a diaper, and socks. The hair on his legs and head had been shorn. When he was strapped into the large wooden chair, the guards proceeded to bind his face with a leather mask that covered his eyes. It had a large hole for his nose and small holes over his mouth, but it left his forehead bare. The mask also attached his head to the chair. Lawson began yelling as his executioners covered his face. His words weren’t clear through the double-paned windows of the death chamber, but he seemed to be shouting, “I’m human, I’m human!” as the airtight door to the room was clamped shut. He continued screaming as the fog of gas rose about him. Many of the witnesses were horrified.
“After about three or four minutes,” one witness said, “he was unable to say the full sentence, ‘I am human,’ but was still crying out the word ‘Human!’ about every twenty seconds. He did this for another two to three minutes. Finally, he couldn’t say even part of the word, but he continued to grunt about every twenty seconds for another minute or minute and a half. His body continued to quiver for another minute or so, then he was still.” It took twelve minutes for Lawson to die, but it seemed much longer. For many of those who saw and heard it, the experience would last a lifetime.53
At last, on October 4, 1994, the district court in San Francisco issued its long-awaited order in Fierro. The result amounted to one of the greatest victories in capital punishment law, for the judge declared execution by lethal gas under California Penal Code §3604 violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.54 For the first time a federal court had found a specific method of legal execution to be unconstitutional. The ruling was particularly noteworthy because it occurred as the death penalty enjoyed its highest level of public support, a record 80 percent in favor according to a Gallup poll in 1994.
The district court noted that the abandonment of the gas chamber by several states stood in sharp contrast to the relatively slow movement away from other methods of execution, and it made clear that the gas chamber had become an outmoded method of execution. Based on the evidence presented, Judge Patel had agreed that cyanide kills by bonding with an enzyme called cytochrome oxydase. When pressed, each expert in the case had claimed that this cytochrome oxydase had something to do with “suffocation,” or what the court quoted as “the transfer of oxygen to the cells,” and that it was experienced much like a massive heart attack. Simply put, the district court found that cyanide blocks the transfer of oxygen to the cells, resulting in histotoxic hypoxia, or cellular suffocation. The district court’s decision also noted that the primary point of disagreement was “whether unconsciousness occurs within at most thirty seconds of inhalation, as defendants maintain, or whether, as plaintiffs contend, unconsciousness occurs much later, after the inmate has endured the painful effects of cyanide gas for several minutes.” Judge Patel found an inmate likely to be conscious for fifteen to sixty seconds from the time the gas first hit his or her face, and possibly conscious, or partly conscious, for up to two minutes.55
In reaching its determination, the federal district court in Fierro offered three major doctrinal expansions: 1) a more comprehensive Eighth Amendment framework than Campbell v. Wood by emphasizing an evolving standards of decency test (dependent upon legislative trends); 2) a broader process for challenging an execution method by allowing an inmate to bring a section 1983 action in lieu of a petition for a writ of habeas corpus; and 3) a more detailed measure of pain and unconsciousness.56 The court held, “Objective evidence of pain must be the primary consideration, and evidence of legislative trends may also be considered where the evidence of pain is not dispositive.”57
The Fierro ruling created a considerable stir in the world of capital punishment. It also appeared to influence a 1994 determination by the U.S. District Court of the District of Maryland, which allowed a Maryland inmate to videotape the lethal gas execution of another inmate. The purpose of the videotaping was to acquire evidence on the length of consciousness and level of pain an individual experiences when exposed to lethal gas.58
But the greatest shock waves from Fierro were yet to come. In 1996 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously endorsed the district court’s suggested standards and held that an execution method may be unconstitutional if an inmate faces a “substantial risk” of suffering “extreme pain for several minutes.”59 The Ninth Circuit’s action marked the first federal appeals court ruling holding unconstitutional any method of legal execution. No other court, state or federal, had ever sustained a general challenge to any method of execution. Prior to the court’s ruling, several other courts had rejected the notion that eyewitness descriptions were valid indications of pain and suffering experienced by a prisoner undergoing execution. The Ninth Circuit Court’s support for the finding that lethal gas violates the Eighth Amendment and enjoining the state of California from using that method to enforce its death judgments was also unprecedented. 60
The U.S. Supreme Court later vacated the Ninth Circuit’s decision in light of the California legislature’s subsequent amendment of the state’s death penalty statute allowing lethal injections to be used unless the capital defendant specifically requested to die by lethal gas.61 But since the ruling by the District Court in Fierro, neither the federal Circuit Court of Appeals nor the U.S. Supreme Court had faulted the argument that death by lethal gas amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
On January 30, 1998, after another North Carolina prisoner waived his appeals, the state prepared to execute him by lethal gas at Central Prison. Ricky Lee Sanderson had been on death row for ten years after he was sentenced for the rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old girl. Sanderson was a drug addict with a long criminal record, but his case was unusual in that he had come forward and confessed to the murder after the police had mistakenly charged another man in the case. A born-again Christian, Sanderson said he had come to believe he deserved to die for his crime and he didn’t want to put the victim’s family through any more grief by fighting his execution.
Martin Kady II was one of the reporters who appeared in Raleigh to witness the execution. When the guards pulled back the gas chamber curtains, Kady was surprised to see in the bright light a chubby, grayhaired man clad in a diaper and boxer shorts. Sanderson’s eyes appeared to convey a sense of “eerie serenity.” The murdered girl’s father sat in front of Kady in the witness room. As the execution team prepared the death chamber, Sanderson called out from his chair, loudly thanking Jesus. As the white plume filled the chamber, Sanderson’s skin turned beet red and he strained against the leather straps. “The executioners,” Kady noted, “had placed a grim, medieval looking leather hood over his face. His eyes were covered so we couldn’t look him in the eye as he died, but nostril holes ensured the deadly gas would be properly inhaled. As he squirmed, white fluid flowed from his nose. His chest heaved as the gas infiltrated his lungs and rendered them obsolete.”