Tennessee Department of Corrections
A Tennessee death row inmate is opting to die in the electric chair, with his lawyer claiming his client thinks the option is the “lesser of two evils,” NBC News reports. Sixty-three-year-old Edmund George Zagorski is scheduled to be put to death on Thursday for killing two 35-year-old men in 1983 who wanted to buy 100 pounds of marijuana from him. Zagorski’s lawyer, Kelley Henry, said the “10 to 18 minutes of drowning, suffocation and chemical burning” that would result from lethal injection would be “unspeakable.” While lethal injection is the standard form of execution in the state, inmates whose offenses were committed before January 1999 may opt for the electric chair. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the 871 executions that have been carried out in the United States since 2000, 14 have been by electrocution. The last one took place in January 2013 in Virginia.