Amid the chaos and confusion across America over lethal drugs used for execution, Tennessee has decided to reintroduce electric chairs as an alternative execution method.
Republican Gov. Bill Halsam signed a bill Thursday allowing the state to electrocute death row inmates if prison authorities do not get the required lethal drugs. With this Tennessee becomes the first U.S. state to bring back the electric chair for execution without providing any option to the inmates.
The bill that was passed last month garnered 23-3 Senate votes and 68-13 House votes in favor of the legislation, CBS News reported.
"There are states that allow inmates to choose, but it is a very different matter for a state to impose a method like electrocution," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "No other state has gone so far."
According to the National Public Radio, Tennessee previously gave the option of either lethal dose or electric chair. However, the new law makes it compulsory that the state can decide electrocution method when it fails to get the lethal drugs.
Republican state Sen. Ken Yager said the reason behind the reintroduction of the electric chair cropped from "a real concern that we could find ourselves in a position that if the chemicals were unavailable to us that we would not be able to carry out the sentence."
The decision comes after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett at an Oklahoma prison raised serious concerns over the secrecy of untested lethal drugs. Locket, 38, was administered a combination of three drugs that was not tested. Following this, he suffered massive pain and died of a heart attack 43 minutes later.
There has been a nationwide scarcity of lethal injection drugs after the European Union imposed an embargo on the export of drugs in 2011, which in turn cut off the United States from its suppliers of the anesthetic sodium thiopental.
The Associated Press reports that a Vanderbilt University poll released this week showed that 56 percent of registered voters in Tennessee supported the use of electric chairs as opposed to 37 percent who were against it.
