From 1890 to 2010, around 3% of all U.S. executions were botched. Lethal injections that didn’t work, hangings where the victim kept gasping for air for over half an hour, and electric chair visits that just didn’t do enough. Willie Francis was one of the 84 people subjected to a botched electric chair execution. His words at the start of the video give us just a small glimpse into the agony experienced by death row inmates in their final seconds and minutes, but what he experienced was just a fraction of the true horrors of the chair. At just 16 years old, Willie was convicted for the murder of Andrew Thomas, a local pharmacist in Louisiana. In 1944, Thomas had been shot and killed. Almost a whole year went by with nobody getting to the bottom of who did it, until police happened upon a black

teenage boy who used to work at the pharmacy. Despite him being 15 at the time of the murder, Willie was sentenced to death, and for the state he was in, that meant the electric chair. Nicknamed Gruesome Gertie, the chair that Willie Francis was strapped into looked severe. Now living in a museum for all of the public to go and see, it has a tall straight wooden back and little in the way of comfort. Why would it? It’s being used to kill people. And yet, there is an element of artistry to it. It’s by no means an arthouse chair in a celebrity’s home but it is not simply a large wooden board either. It has shape and form. Somebody designed it and chose how it should look. Someone sanded it down and varnished it so that no one would get splinters from it. Even as their bodies writhed and thrashed in agony.

The two men appointed to set up the chair correctly had turned up to work drunk. In their inebriated state, they had made some mistakes assembling the thing. Willie, of course, didn’t know this as he took his seat on the hard wooden boards, but as the executioner flipped the switch, it was evident that something was wrong. It felt like a hundred and a thousand needles and pins were pricking in me all over, and my left leg felt like somebody was cutting it with a razor blade. I could feel my arms jumping at my sides … I thought for a minute I was going to knock the chair over … I think I must have hollered for them to stop. They say I said, 'Take it off! Take it off!' I know that was certainly what I wanted them to do—turn it off. Willie shouldn’t have been able to speak. Normally, the voltages passed

through the victims are upwards of 2,000 for the initial shock. There’s little the victims can do but spasm and burn, yet Willie was able to yell out for help. The needles and pinpricks all over his body, as painful as they would have been, seem to fall short of the pain you’d expect from an effective execution. The executioners shut the chair off, and Willie returned to his cell. Try as they might, his lawyer could do little to help his fate. They tried to use what had happened as evidence of ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ and tried to argue that he had already been ‘executed’ once and thus had fulfilled his sentence, and it wasn’t his fault he hadn’t died. Much to everyone’s surprise, however, Willie Francis himself persuaded his lawyer to drop it. He didn’t want to go through another trial and had accepted his fate. It was his intention

to go to meet the Lord with his “Sunday pants and Sunday heart.” He was executed on May 9th, 1947. So to the main question, what does it feel like to sit in the electric chair? Not a botched attempt like Willie Francis’s first execution; let’s take a look at what would have happened at his second execution. Brace yourself; it’s probably much worse than you are imagining. Put yourself in Willie Francis’s shoes, and let’s walk you through step by step what he would have experienced. The first thing happens before you go to the execution chamber. You’ll be stripped by the guards, and one of them will shave you. Any hair on your head will be unceremoniously chopped off and then shaved down to the skin. They likely won’t care about doing this part gently. If you ask nicely, they might only shave out the patch they need to,

but we probably wouldn’t recommend keeping any hair for reasons you’ll soon find out. It’s not just your head hair, either. Some electric chairs require that your back be clean shaven, and for others, it will be your legs. As soon as you walk into the chamber, you can see why that is. The points they’ve shaved on your body are where the electrodes will connect. These are the points where the electric current will surge into your body. If you are still able to stand through the waves of terror washing through you, it’s time to go over and take your seat. If you don’t do it yourself, you’ll be forced into it. They have leather straps all over the chair that the guards will one-by-one tie around you, locking you in place. You brace yourself for the cool metal electrodes to touch your skin, but they don’t. Instead, something wet and squishy presses against the top of your

head and small of your back. A couple of sponges soaked in salt water. It’s important that the executioners get this part right. If the sponges are too wet, then the chair will short-circuit before it’s had a chance to kill you. If they’re too dry, then there will be too much resistance, and the current will be too low to kill you. The sponges may even catch fire, which has happened a number of times and led to botched executions. The last thing they’ll do is put a blindfold on you before they all leave you alone in the room. Standing on the other side of the glass in the observation room, the executioner will flip the switch. Instantaneously, around 2,000 volts course through your body. The electric current is so strong that you immediately lose control of all of your muscles. Your hands clench around the arms of the chair, your bowels empty themselves,

and your limbs thrash against the restraints so violently that you dislocate and break multiple bones. Your body is quite literally trying to tear itself free from the agonizing pain. You will likely vomit, and there will probably be blood in it as your stomach muscles convulse and panic. Every nerve in your body is suddenly overwhelmed with electrical signals. Your nervous system relies on electricity to work and uses it as the primary way of communicating pain. With electricity flooding every inch of your body, every nerve goes into meltdown. Unfortunately, the electric chair doesn’t necessarily kill very fast. This first wave of electricity will last for 30 seconds. At this point, the executioner will shut it off and allow the doctors to enter the room to check on the victim. They themselves will need to wait before they can touch the body. Once it has cooled, they check the victim’s heart. If it is still beating, they withdraw,

and another round of electricity is administered. This cycle continues until the heart gives out. For anyone observing these later stages of the execution, it becomes increasingly more disturbing to watch. Willie Francis was not the only victim of a botched execution by an electric chair. Some victims burst into flames from the head or the legs. For others, their blood vessels ruptured beneath the skin, causing intense bruising and swelling, as well as heavy bleeding from their nostrils. In some cases, the victims survive for a couple of minutes, but in many, they last for a lot longer. One woman was still alive 24 minutes after the initial shock was carried out. Morticians who carry out an autopsy on the bodies afterward have to experience something truly horrific. They have to wait for the body to cool entirely before beginning, which can take a while, depending on how long the person was shocked.

The parts of the body where the electrodes touched are often burnt away entirely, all the way down to the bone, leaving smoldering flesh in an ugly ring around the site. The electric chair is designed to kill instantly by shocking the heart and the brain, but this does not always work. The secondary kill method, which always succeeds eventually, is to cook the vital organs until they are no longer functional. Many victims, especially those of botched executions, die from this secondary method. If you cut open the skull of an electric chair victim, you may well find that the brain resting in their head has been cooked through. If the victim does not lose consciousness quickly enough, they may be forced to sit there and experience what it feels like to slowly have their brain shutting off as different lobes cook. The electric chair was intended to be safer and more humane than execution methods of the past.

but many have grown to see it as being far more extreme and barbaric. As such, most states in the US no longer use the electric chair as an execution method. As of 2024, the only places that still reserve the electric chair as an option for execution are the U.S. states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Electrocution is also authorized in Florida if lethal injection is found unconstitutional. For the most part, states have tried to switch over to lethal injection. The cocktail of chemicals administered into death row inmates’ arms offers a less horrific way of killing somebody. While many claim that the drugs knock the patient unconscious before they feel any pain, there are studies that dispute this claim too. Now check out 50 insane facts about the CIA you never knew. Or watch this video instead.

What The Electric Chair Really Feels Like

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