Ol' Sparky one step closer to death

If Timothy Dawson is convicted and sentenced to death for gunning down three men in an Atlanta hotel, he could become the only man on death row who can't be executed.

The judge who will preside over Dawson's March trial signed a pre-trial order on Jan. 11 that states the electric chair kills cruelly and inhumanely. Defense attorneys have been trying since the 1970s to convince Georgia judges that there is something wrong with the state's electric chair. Now one judge, in one case, agrees.

Fulton Superior Court Judge Wendy Shoob wrote in her order that the electric chair is unconstitutional, that it "offends the evolving standards of decency" and is "indicative of inhumanity and barbarity."

Shoob's ruling, however, applies only to Dawson. For the approximate 130 inmates under death sentence, the ones who committed crimes before lawmakers replaced electrocution with lethal injection, the state will continue to mandate electrocution -- unless the Georgia Supreme Court decides to outlaw it.

The court could be set to do so. On Jan. 22, it will look for the first time at the evidence Judge Shoob used to reach her conclusion. If the justices, like Shoob, rule that the electric chair is unconstitutional, it would be the first such ruling in the country.

"The Supreme Court is not bound by anything the Superior Court does," says defense attorney Michael Mears, who has worked eight years to get the justices to listen to the evidence. "But certainly what we hope is that they'll pay attention to it."

A 200-page transcript forms the crux of the evidence. In the transcript, a professor who studies pain says that some of the men electrocuted in Georgia remained conscious throughout the execution and experienced "exquisitely painful" body contractions, blistering burns, an inability to breathe and the sensation of a heart attack. He says "all of these things could converge to make excruciating, awful pain occur during judicial electrocution."

Another witness, an engineer who studies deaths by electrocution, says that at least two Georgia inmates weren't killed by the electric chair's two-minute cycle of volts. The inmates had to wait five minutes and then be re-electrocuted.

"That's to be expected," the witness says. "You cannot guarantee that one series will actually do it."

Convicted murderer Christopher Smith said prior to his 1998 trial that all this bickering over how to kill people does little good.

"I just feel that this is a waste of time, that it doesn't matter to me which way it's carried out," Smith said. "That if I'm sentenced to death it's gonna be death either way."