Tennessee Department of Correction
Another Tennessee prisoner has requested to die in the electric chair rather than by lethal injection, which would make him only the third to die by the chair in the state since 1960. Murderer Edmund Zagorski made national headlines when he was executed by the chair last month, making him the first prisoner executed by that method in the United States since 2013. Now another convicted murderer, David Earl Miller, has opted for the chair over lethal injection—Tennessee’s preferred method of execution. Only prisoners whose crimes occurred before 1999 have the option to choose electrocution in the state. Lawyers for Miller have argued that Tennessee’s midazolam-based, three-drug injection method causes excruciating pain. Miller was sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of Lee Standifer, 23, in Knoxville. He’s sentenced to die on Dec. 6.