On 8 February 1924, in America, the gas block chamber invented by toxicologist Dr. Allen McLean Hamilton was first used as a tool for legalized murder. Prior to this, the tests were carried out on dogs and cats and in February 1924 – for the first time on a person. The cyanide gas, to everyone’s disappointment, was not nearly as painless and effective a means of killing as Hamilton had claimed: the condemned Gee Jon struggled desperately for two minutes, holding his breath and trying to free himself from the straps, until finally his body went limp and he lost consciousness. To be sure, the corpse of the executed man was kept in the cell for another half hour, it was ventilated. A committee of several congressmen and government officials who oversaw the execution recognized the experiment as a success. By 1960, the gas chamber as a ‘humane’ method of execution was already used in ten American states.
Igor Dzhokhadze. The criminal chronicle of mankind
Translated by Elizaveta O. Ovchinnikova
