Gas Chamber

When they were handing out the whole "nine lives" package, one Salt Lake City cat apparently got seconds. Maybe thirds. According to a jaw-dropping tale in the Salt Lake Tribune , a stray cat named Andrea has one Utah city rethinking its euthanasia policy after the cat survived not one, but two rounds in a gas chamber. Last year the black cat was put on death row after no one adopted her at the shelter. According to the story, Andrea was "plopped" into the gas chamber to be euthanized but when she showed signs of life after the process, they gassed her again.

When they were handing out the whole "nine lives" package, one Salt Lake City cat apparently got seconds. Maybe thirds. According to a jaw-dropping tale in the Salt Lake Tribune , a stray cat named Andrea has one Utah city rethinking its euthanasia policy after the cat survived not one, but two rounds in a gas chamber. Last year the black cat was put on death row after no one adopted her at the shelter. According to the story, Andrea was "plopped" into the gas chamber to be euthanized but when she showed signs of life after the process, they gassed her again.

John Grisham's new novel may keep you awake nights, but it won't be because of the story's suspense. Compared to the run-rabbit-run pacing of "The Firm," "The Pelican Brief" and "The Client," "The Chamber" has all the forward action of a non-ninja turtle.Still, the book's subject matter may disturb sleep. The title refers to the gas chamber, and much of the story is concerned with how the state of Mississippi goes about executing convicted criminals, from testing the gas on a rabbit the night before an execution to smearing petroleum jelly on the chamber's windows to prevent seepage.

Maryland has been engaged in capital punishment for more than 200 years - first by hanging, then a gas chamber and finally by lethal injection. The earliest recorded execution in the state took place Oct. 22, 1773, when four "convict servants" were hanged for slitting the throat of their master, Archibald Hoffman, according to a Maryland Penitentiary historian who wrote an overview on capital punishment for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and...

Maryland, which has not executed a prisoner since 1961, is one of three states to rely exclusively on the gas chamber, a method criticized by some doctors and civil liberties advocates as inhumane.Only Maryland, Arizona and California, where Robert Alton Harris was executed yesterday, continue to use the gas chamber. Two others give condemned prisoners a choice between the gas chamber and lethal injection.By a 7-2 margin, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal by Harris' lawyers claiming that the gas chamber violated the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

DENTON -- Michael Whittlesey, who robbed and killed a classmate in 1982 and buried the body Gunpowder Falls State Park, was sentenced by a Caroline County jury last night to die in Maryland's gas chamber.Whittlesey was convicted of robbing 17-year-old Jamie Griffin in 1984, but the murder prosecution was delayed for years while authorities and Jamie's parents searched the park for the remains that were finally found in 1990.The trial, moved to the Denton courthouse from Baltimore County at Whittlesey's request, ended with his conviction on capital murder charges March 29."

Jerome Page denied killing Amanda Lee Hall when arrested, during his trial and even when he was sentenced last week to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the 15-year-old Landsdowne girl's murder.But yesterday, in a last-ditch effort to save his twin brother from the gas chamber, he took the witness stand and said that he, not Tyrone Page, strangled Miss Hall last June.The tactic worked, and now neither will get the gas chamber.The Baltimore County judge who convicted Tyrone of the murder said he couldn't decide which twin killed Miss Hall.

Maryland prison officials allowed reporters and photographers to have a look yesterday at the gas chamber at the Maryland Penitentiary, but refused to say much about the impending execution of John F. Thanos."

AFTER SAYING he wanted to die in the gas chamber so his execution would look like "murder," Flint Gregory Hunt changed his mind last week and asked for lethal injection.Although a Circuit Court judge denied his request the Court of Appeals granted it, which will make Hunt the second person to die by injection in Maryland. The first was triple-murderer John F. Thanos in 1994 when injection became the official means of capital punishment.By choosing the gas chamber and then changing his mind at the last minute, Hunt may have been trying a ploy to gain a further delay.

A Baltimore County judge yesterday dismissed a death row inmate's constitutional challenge to Maryland's gas chamber and, in doing so, denied a request to have the execution of convicted killer John F. Thanos videotaped as evidence.The unexpected ruling in an appeal by Donald Thomas surprised prosecutors and defense attorneys, who had expected to wait until next week to argue Thomas' contention that execution by lethal gas constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.Yesterday's hearing was supposed to involve Thomas' request to have Thanos videotaped and monitored by an electroencephalograph (EEG)

THE EARLIEST recorded Maryland execution was Oct. 22, 1773, when four convict servants were hanged in Frederick for slitting the throat of their master, Archibald Hoffman The first description of a Maryland execution came from John Duncan, a visitor to Baltimore in 1818, who witnessed the hanging of two mail robbers from outside the prison court yard along with numerous other spectators: "I had in my pocket a small perspective glass which I offered to...

Anybody who thinks the Johns Hopkins University is a dull school should have been around the Northeast Baltimore campus in early November, when the issues of free speech and ethnicity came to a head in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter.Some background might provide a bit of clarity. The News-Letter editorial board is predominantly Jewish. One Andrew Pergam - 20, Jewish, business editor of the News-Letter and possibly a future columnist, if his essays in my opinion-writing class are any indication - takes an ad to Douglas Steinke, also Jewish and one of two editors in chief for the paper.

AFTER SAYING he wanted to die in the gas chamber so his execution would look like "murder," Flint Gregory Hunt changed his mind last week and asked for lethal injection.Although a Circuit Court judge denied his request the Court of Appeals granted it, which will make Hunt the second person to die by injection in Maryland. The first was triple-murderer John F. Thanos in 1994 when injection became the official means of capital punishment.By choosing the gas chamber and then changing his mind at the last minute, Hunt may have been trying a ploy to gain a further delay.

Flint Gregory Hunt will not be executed in the state's gas chamber; instead he will die by lethal injection on a 300-pound steel table as he had requested in an 11th-hour petition to the state, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.The ruling fulfills what is perhaps one of the last wishes Hunt will have before his scheduled execution next week for the 1985 murder of Baltimore police Officer Vincent J. Adolfo.The court's unanimous, two-page decision included the condition that Hunt waive his right to challenge any further the method of his execution.

Flint Gregory Hunt, awaiting execution in the state's gas chamber next week, now says he wants to die by lethal injection -- but a city judge says it's too late to let the convicted killer change his mind.Baltimore Circuit Judge Richard T. Rombro, presiding over an emergency hearing on Hunt's request yesterday, said he feared that allowing an 11th-hour change would open up challenges to the method of death that could further delay Hunt's 12-year wait for execution.But delay may be inevitable.

If Flint Gregory Hunt holds to his wish to be executed in the gas chamber next week, it will be one of the last uses in this country of what is seen as a dying method of capital punishment.It will be the final time in Maryland that a correctional officer pulls the lever that drops crystals of sodium cyanide into a bowl of sulfuric acid and water to create the deadly vapors -- an execution process that has taken place only four times before in the state's history."It's slowly going away," Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said of the gas chamber.

A retired professor of anesthesiology who witnessed Maryland's last execution said during a hearing challenging the state's use of the gas chamber that the execution reminded him of a 1948 visit to a Nazi death camp.Dr. Sylvan M. Shane, a retired dentist and former professor at the Johns Hopkins University, described the struggling of Nathaniel Lipscomb, who was put to death June 9, 1961."When I saw that and I thought back to what I had seen at Auschwitz, I thought this is probably the most inhumane thing I had ever seen," he said.

Flint Gregory Hunt will not be executed in the state's gas chamber; instead he will die by lethal injection on a 300-pound steel table as he had requested in an 11th-hour petition to the state, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.The ruling fulfills what is perhaps one of the last wishes Hunt will have before his scheduled execution next week for the 1985 murder of Baltimore police Officer Vincent J. Adolfo.The court's unanimous, two-page decision included the condition that Hunt waive his right to challenge any further the method of his execution.

Flint Gregory Hunt does not plan to go gentle into that good night.As the hour of his execution approaches, scheduled for the week of June 30, he does not want to be seen going peacefully, to have the calm death that lethal injection can convey.He wants his passing to be ugly, in the gas chamber, where he thinks it will look like "murder."In an interview yesterday at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center -- "Supermax" -- in East Baltimore, Hunt spoke of his remorse, his anger, and occasionally, his fear.

A BLACK MAN SHOT a white police officer during a robbery and was sentenced to death. Fighting to save his life, he came forward with numbers, with perhaps the most respected study yet, that showed that the race of his victim -- white -- made it much more likely statistically that he would end up facing the electric chair than any other characteristic of his crime.The man was Warren McCleskey, and in 1987 he came close to convincing the U.S. Supreme Court he should not be executed. But the court voted, 5-4, that unless McCleskey had proof of discrimination in his own case, he had no constitutional right to escape the death penalty.