For the families of John Wayne Gacy’s victims, his death was long anticipated. The man who tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys during the 1970’s was finally executed by lethal injection at the Illinois Stateville Penitentiary. Justice would be served, swiftly and cleanly, as three chemicals were introduced intravenously into his bloodstream. The first drug would knock him out, the second would suppress his breathing, and the last would stop his heart-in no more than five minutes. But Gacy took 18 minutes to die. A clog developed in the delivery tube attached to his arm. He snorted just before death-chamber attendants pulled a curtain around him as they struggled to clear a tube. Finally, the two lethal drugs streamed into him. The monster was dead.
On September 2, 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray, sentenced to die for the rape-slaying of a three-year-old girl, entered the gas chamber in Parchman, Mississippi. Executions of this sort are supposed to end with a quick loss of consciousness. But eight minutes after his execution began; witnesses cleared the viewing area, repelled by what they were seeing. Gray, suffocating and purple-faced, died slamming his head against a steel pole.
Opponents of capital punishment charged that the mishap again proved that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. “A lot of people think lethal injection is like putting a dog to sleep,” says Kica Matos, research director of the Capital Punishment Project of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense Fund. “But things still go wrong with all types of executions. It’s as gruesome and barbaric as torture.”
