Electric Chair Quotes

“Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French Fries!'"
Convicted murderer James French to members of the press who were witnesses at his execution by the State of Oklahoma in the electric chair in 1966.”
― James French

“Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.

He was. He was going to shake hands with death.

He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.

("3 Kills For 1")”
― Cornell Woolrich, Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich

“The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“Smoke puffed from the open V of his shirt. And still the humming of the electricity went on and on, filling my head, vibrating in there. I think it's the sound mad people must hear, that or something like it.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“He'd been in the yard long enough to understand when he could afford to face into the breeze and when he'd do better to bend in the hurricane.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“Mateso yalishakuwa mengi, na Murphy alishakata tamaa. Kesho yake alitamani sana aione lakini hakukuwa na dalili yoyote ya maadui kumwacha hai. Walivyomning’iniza kama nyama ya kuokwa kwa kipindi kirefu, walichoka kupiga na kumkalisha katika kiti cha umeme na kumfunga miguu na mikono kwa machuma makubwa yaliyofanana na pingu.”
― Enock Maregesi, Kolonia Santita

“In Sing Sing Prison, in a ghastly white room stands a chair. Its parts are heavy joinings of oak, riveted and screwed together; its strong legs fastened to the floor with teeth and claws of steel. It bites into the marrow of men with fangs of fire. For this is the faldstool of bloody human justice, the prayer-chair of man’s vengeance upon man. Into it are strapped ... men who have killed other men. In it, for a high moral purpose, erring human lives are shocked across the barrier into night and the grave. - Edward H. Smith (1918)”
― Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini, Antonio's Will

“The Death House back then was a self-contained unit, with its own hospital, kitchen, exercise yard and visiting room. The cells were inadequate, dark, and did not have proper sanitary facilities or ventilation. One window and skylight furnished the ventilation and light of the entire unit. Twelve cells were on the lower tier, six on each side, facing each other, with a narrow corridor between them. Five cells were located in an upper tier. There was an area the prisoners called the Dance Hall that housed a prisoner to be executed on his last day. The narrow corridor connected the Dance Hall to the execution room, where the Electric Chair resided. The prisoners named this corridor the Last Mile or the Green Mile, because this was the last walk a prisoner would take all the way to the small green riveted door at the end of the corridor, on his way to the execution room.”
― Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini, Antonio's Will

“The physiological effects of an electrocution are severe and painful. Besides launching the body into violent convulsions, the electrocution of a human being causes massive destruction throughout the body.”
― Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini, Antonio's Will

“The photographer had a camera strapped around one leg, attached to a cable that ran up his trouser leg and into a pocket. He could squeeze a bulb in his pocket to take one picture which would be unnoticed in the glare of sparks and the horror generated by the chair.”
― Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York