STILL LOOKING FOR BETTER EXECUTIONS
Nev. tried gas chamber in 1924; recently, Ala. used nitrogen
One hundred years ago, a stray white cat and her kittens became the first creatures to die in a gas chamber at a U.S. prison.
The cats had committed no crime. They were put to death to test a new form of execution scheduled to be used the following day — Feb. 8, 1924 — on two convicted killers.
They were Gee Jon, who shot a gang rival in the copper mining town of Mina, Nev., in 1921, and Thomas Russell, who stabbed his girlfriend in Elko, Nev., in 1922.
The animal experiment was set for Feb. 6, but a soft-hearted prison worker took pity on the condemned cat and freed it from its cage during the night.
That worker was only one of several voices raised in protest about the use of lethal gas for execution. Four prison guards quit when they learned of plans to choose the executioner by drawing lots. One told a reporter he “didn’t want to take a chance on being mixed up in it.”
Newspapers talked of the “pictured horrors of the proposed executions” and raised the specter of soldiers killed—or maimed for life—by poison gas in No Man’s Land.
Phosgene, mustard, and other toxic fumes snuffed out the lives of more than 90,000 soldiers on World War I battlefields. When the war ended, U.S. manufacturers scrambled to find peacetime applications— like exterminating citrus grove pests—for this terrifying weapon, wrote Scott Christianson in his book “The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber.”
With the passage of its Humane Execution Bill in March 1921, Nevada became the first state to adopt lethal gas. Nevada had traditionally offered a choice of shooting or hanging.
The crime that put Jon, 29, and his accomplice, Hughie Sing, 19, on death row was an assassination, the murder for hire of a laundry man who was a member of a rival Tong, one of the Chinese gangs in the early 20th century.
A cabbie drove the killers the 175 miles from Reno to Mina. Arrests came quickly after the pair returned to Reno. Sing’s lawyers argued that their client did not commit the killing — Jon pulled the trigger — and should be treated less harshly. The jury disagreed and convicted both of first-degree murder.
Russell, a Mexican-American, landed on death row for stabbing his girlfriend, Mamie Johnny, 21, while she, her mother, and brother were returning home from a rodeo on Sept. 15, 1922.
All three were sentenced to die in Nevada’s gas chamber. But at the time of their sentencing, no gas chamber existed. The state had to appropriate funds to build one, once they figured out what was needed to execute the prisoner without inadvertently killing executioners and witnesses.
First, the state erected a steel-barred cell in the yard of the state prison at Carson City. Then, the death room was moved to a small stone building previously used as a barbershop. Workers sealed up cracks and outfitted the building with pipes to deliver the gas and roof vents to disburse it later.
The gas—hydrogen cyanide—had to be shipped by truck from Los Angeles to Carson City, Nev., a perilous trip of nearly 450 miles.
While construction was underway, attorneys for Jon, Sing, and Russell argued that the cases were built on slim evidence and that prejudice against Chinese and Mexicans had made it impossible for their clients to get a fair trial.
On Jan. 28, the state board of pardons commuted Sing’s sentence to life. He would be paroled in 1938.
Just a few hours before the scheduled execution, Russell was granted clemency. He earned his parole in the same years as Sing.
But the clock kept ticking for Gee Jon.
A group of 30 witnesses, reporters, and spectators filed into the prison yard to watch his death through a window. A few moments later, Jon, flanked by two burly guards, made his way to the stone building, entered the door of the death cell, and sat down in the plain pine chair.
“Gee Jon, Chinese, died today by lethal gas, the first man to be executed by the new sleeping death,” the Daily News reported.
“There was a hiss of the poison gas rushing under pressure through the conduits and into the cell,” according to the News. “Watchers at the death house window saw a slight tremor of the body and then the man’s head fell suddenly to the right side and the doctors declared that he was dead.”
The gas was supposed to result in instant death. But it took considerably longer, about six minutes, to end Jon’s life. It was too cold in the death house to vaporize the liquid, so the process took more time than anticipated.
Thirty-three men died in the Nevada gas chamber, which went through several redesigns, over the years. The state’s last gas chamber execution was in 1979.
In 1983, Nevada adopted lethal injection for executions. It has been the standard in the U.S. since then, although someone is always trying to find a better way. In January in Alabama, nitrogen gas was tried for the first time in the hope it might be a more humane method of carrying out the ultimate penalty.
As for the Nevada gas chamber, State Prison Director Vernon Housewright, said in 1983 that it was retired at just the right time.
“I’m just a little concerned about the safety of the gas chamber here because of the age of it,” he told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “Before we’d use it, we would test it and test it and test it again. But if it ever did leak when we used it, it would kill everybody around, including the witnesses.”