WASHINGTON (AFP) — An American man who killed his four children was executed by electrocution Wednesday in Tennessee, the first time the US state has used the electric chair since 1960.
Daryl Holton, 45, had chosen to be killed by electrocution over receiving a lethal injection, the method most used to kill death row inmates in the United States.
"We understand that the electrocution went well and that he was gone instantly, at least as far as executions go," Isaac Kimes, the field organizer for the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, told AFP by telephone.
Kimes, who attended a vigil with about 50 other people outside the jail, said prison officials informed him that Holton died at around 1:25 am.
Prisoners usually shun death by electrocution, fearing they might catch fire during the grisly procedure, or linger as long as 20 minutes before dying.
Most prisons and executioners want to avoid the spectacle of electrocuting prisoners whose arms and legs flail around and who often urinate, vomit, defecate or burn when the electrical current courses through their bodies.
Of the 1,096 executions since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 153 were conducted by electrocution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The figure excludes Holton's execution.
By comparison, the lethal injection was used 926 times.
The last death by electrocution took place in Virginia in July 2006, according to the center.
Holton, an advocate of the death penalty, preferred the electrocution over the potentially less violent death through lethal injection to pay the price for murdering his four children, who were ages four, six, 10 and 12, in 1997.
"You have a lot of argument nowadays that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, by a number of my neighbors in here on death row -- at least by their attorneys," Holton told the New York Times.
"To be honest with you, they are both probably effective and painless methods of execution," Holton, who rejected opportunities to appeal his sentence, told the daily.
"I'm using the word 'probably' because any evidence regarding that is going to be hearsay," he said. "It's rare that someone lives to tell about how an execution felt."
That Holton killed his four children was not at issue, nor that he killed them in a premeditated manner, making it a capital crime; he methodically blindfolded them and told them not to peek, as he shot one after the other through the heart.
He felt it was the correct moral choice: to save them from being brought up with a mother having a history of alcoholism and abuse.
One of the few issues at trial was whether Holton's state of mind was sound enough for a jury to believe he understood the difference between right and wrong at the time of the murders, making him eligible to die.
Three mental health experts testified, one called by the prosecution and two for the defense, that Holton was suffering a deep depression at the time of the murder. He had suffered prior bouts of depression and his family has a history of suicide.
In 1992, Holton left his military career, which required him to live largely overseas, to return to the United States to take custody of his three boys and a girl. However, his wife won custody.
Then in early 1997, she disappeared for several months, without contacting him until November.
Holton got to spend an afternoon with the children on November 30, took them to an amusement park, and a McDonalds before taking them home, where he shot them with an assault rifle. He then turned himself in at the nearest police station.
"It is hard to imagine a more tragic series of events, but it is also hard to imagine how a man so clearly mentally ill, driven by such delusional thinking, would be sentenced to death," the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing said in a statement.
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