EXPERIMENTS ON EXECUTED MEN.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 443, 15 December 1908, Page 4

EXPERIMENTS ON EXECUTED MEN.

Coroner to Try to Restore

Victims.

Dr George F. Shrady, coroner of New York City, is to experiment ou seven men now awaiting execution at Ling Ling to decide whether murderers in New York State who are executed by electricity, suffer . excruciating torture before they are dead. Dr Shrady believes that execution by electricity is inhuman. He declares that the electric shocks do not kill, and that death is inflicted by the doctors who perform the post mortem examinations. He asserts that in almost all cases it is possible to revive persons who have been subjected to the Sing Sing electric current, and he declares that in the few actual cases where revivification has taken place, the persons give awful descriptions of the agony caused by the electricity. Dr. Shrady says that one case has come to his knowledge in which a criminal, W. G. Taylor, revived after the electric shock, and was then chloroformed to death, the doctors holding him down while the anaesthetic was administered. In the case of William Kerameler, after the first charge had failed to kill, the man was horribly burned by the second charge, and even then showed signs of life while the doctors were making a post-mortem examination of his brain. No time has been fixed for the death of the seven Sing Sing murderers, but when the dates are announced, Dr. Shrady will attend the executions, and after the men have been pronounced dead by the prison authorities, he will attempt to bring them back to life.

If he succeeds in restoring animation, the abolition of “electrocution ” in New York, for which many doctors have long agitated, will probably follow.