Zagorski’s last words in electric chair: ‘Let’s rock’

NASHVILLE — A Tennessee inmate’s final words were “let’s rock” moments before he became the first man executed in the electric chair in this state since 2007, put to death for the killings of two men during a drug deal-turned-robbery decades ago.

Edmund Zagorski, 63, was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. Thursday at a Nashville maximumsecurity prison, officials said.

Asked if he had any last words in the death chamber, the inmate said, “Let’s rock,” shortly before the execution was carried out.

Reporters witnessing the scene said at a news briefing afterward that he alternated between grimacing and smiling as he lay strapped down and that a sponge was placed on his head and then a shroud over his face. The witnesses said the inmate’s fists then clenched when the electricity began flowing and his body appeared to rise, but he did not move once the execution procedure was over.

In opting for the electric chair over a lethal injection as Tennessee allowed him, Zagorski had argued it would be a quicker and less painful way to die. He became only the second person to die in the electric chair in Tennessee since 1960. Nationwide, only 14 other people have been put to death in the electric chair since 2000, including a Virginia inmate in 2013.

The execution was carried out shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday evening denied the inmate’s request for a stay. Zagorski’s attorneys had argued that it was unconstitutional to force him to choose between the electric chair and lethal injection.

The state came close to administering a chemical injection to the 63-year-old inmate three weeks ago, a plan halted by Tennessee’s governor when Zagorski exercised his right to request the electric chair.

The Supreme Court’s statement said Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the dissenting voice, noting Zagorski’s decision to opt for the electric chair.

“He did so not because he thought that it was a humane way to die, but because he thought that the threedrug cocktail that Tennessee had planned to use was even worse,” Sotomayor said in the statement. “Given what most people think of the electric chair, it’s hard to imagine a more striking testament — from a person with more at stake — to the legitimate fears raised by the lethal-injection drugs that Tennessee uses.”

Zagorski was convicted of the April 1983 slayings of two men during a drug deal. Prosecutors said Zagorski shot John Dotson and Jimmy Porter and then slit their throats after robbing the two men after they came to him to buy marijuana.

In Tennessee, condemned inmates whose crimes occurred before 1999 can choose the electric chair — one of six states that allow such a choice.

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled on whether use of the electric chair violates the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but it came close about 20 years ago following a series of botched electrocutions in Florida. During two executions in the 1990s smoke and flames shot from the condemned inmates’ heads. In 1999, blood spilled from under an inmate’s mask.

Shortly afterward, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the electric chair. But the case was dropped when Florida made lethal injection its primary execution method.

Republican Gov. Bill Haslam declined to intervene in Zagorski’s case despite receiving pleas from former jurors who convicted the inmate, correctional officers and Zagorski’s priest.