Tag: death-penalty, electric-chair, historical-fiction

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)