bition against cruel and unusual punishment to try and prove thatthe courts was not able to say that lethal gas was a painless way of putting a man to death. He tried to prove that it would subject the victim to either pain or torture. Many people attended the execution of Gee Jon, some of who were physicians and scientists. They came to try and prove that this was a humane way of killing a man, and were unanimous in the end, pronouncing this as a quick and painless method of execution. "Several of them said they thought it the most merciful form yet devised." (Vila, pg. 78-79) This is what happened to the victim according to A. Huftaker, E. E. Hammer, and Major D. A. Turner of the Army Medical Reserve Corps., The man went unconscious after his first breath of the vaporized acid (liquid hydrocyanic acid). Since the man was unconscious he did not feel any pain and died almost instantly. There for the death penalty was for that time a humane way of killing someone. Electrocution was also done away with in Florida. In it's place came lethal injection. The 74 year old oak chair was banished after the second messed up execution in seven years. Jesse Tafero's in 1990 and Pedro Medina's on march 25. These cases were the basis for the accusation that the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment. In both executions, flames shot from the prisoners' heads when the current of electricity wasturned on. The chair's head gear was blamed for this problem. "It was brutal, terrible. It was a burning-alive, literally," said attorney Michael Minerva after witnessing the Medina execution. After all this happened the question of what would replace the electric chair if and when Florida got rid of it came up. The answer to that was lethal injection, a mix of drugs that sends a person in to unconsciousness and then kills them. This was described as similar to putting an animal down. This was a method already employed by 32 states and seemed like the b...
