What Gov. Flower Says

Last week we mentioned the fact that Dr. Gibbons of Syracuse had petitioned the Governor to allow him the privilege of experimenting upon the next victim of the electrical chair. The Governor seems to favor the proposition of Gibbons providing the law will permit. The Governor says he is willing to allow experts to make a test to ascertain whether a man killed in the electrical chair can be resuscitated. He made this statement when his attention was called to the printed allegations that certain physicians would ask for such permission: “I am perfectly willing to allow the experiment to be made if it is in my power under the law. I think it would be a good thing to have this long standing controversy settled at once and forever.”

Ever since the adoption of the electrical execution by the state, the Westinghouse people, whose dynamos are used, have declared that electricity was not the cause of death, but that death was assured by the holding of an autopsy directly after the body had been taken from the electrical chair.

No less an authority than Nikola Tesla, the famous electrician, contended that he could bring to life a man killed in an electrical chair, provided the attempt was made immediately after execution.

George Westinghouse has always asserted that the electrical death was a sham and that a New York commission, headed by Elbridge T. Gerry, had added the autopsy clause to the law so as to make it certain that the man was dead. Within the past two weeks the agitation of the subject has again become prominent and an appeal is to be made to the governor to allow the next man condemned to death at Auburn to be experimented upon. This request is the one the governor says he will grant.

The attempt if made will undoubtedly create great excitement and intense interest in the scientific world. It will also arouse curiosity among laymen, because if successful it will bring to life a man who cannot be again executed, having suffered the penalty of death. It will also prove that the state executioners have been the surgeons who have held the autopsy rather than the state electrician.

Dr. Gibbons since reading the Governor’s statement says that as the law reads now the murderer must be executed, an autopsy performed immediately and then the body must be buried in quick lime and in that way effectively destroyed. So you see that aside from a special act of the Legislature there is probably only one other way which would allow the experiment to be tried and that is to have the governor commute Wilson’s sentence to life imprisonment and have the notice of commutation arrive just after the current had been turned on. It is no more than right that the sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment provided Wilson suffers all the penalties attached to an electrical execution. His willingness to contribute in such a degree to the interest of science should be rewarded, should the experiment prove successful.