Tennessee inmate on death row requests execution by electric chair over lethal injection
A Tennessee double murderer who was scheduled to be executed later this week has requested the state for the electric chair rather than a lethal injection, citing the former as the "lesser of two evils." Edmund Zagorski was sentenced to death after murdering John Dotson and Jimmy Porter in 1983 and made the request just two hours before the state's supreme court ruled that the three-drug lethal injection protocol followed in its prisons was constitutional.
According to CBS News, the request was confirmed by Zagorski's attorney Kelley Henry after the supreme court decision cleared the path for his client to be executed at 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 11. In an emailed statement, Henry wrote, "Faced with the choice of two unconstitutional methods of execution, Mr. Zagorski has indicated that if his execution is to move forward, he believes that the electric chair is the lesser of two evils," adding that "10-18 minutes of drowning, suffocation, and chemical burning is unspeakable."