Problems With The Yellow Mama
Alabama has experienced several problematic executions involving Yellow Mama. First, on April 22, 1983, the first post-Furman prisoner to be executed by Alabama, John Louis Evans was hit with the first jolt of electricity, which lasted 30 seconds. John’s body tensed up, causing the electrode on his left leg to snap off. Soon there was smoke and flames that shot out from under the hood that covered his head. When two physicians entered the death chamber they found him still alive. Ignoring John’s lawyer’s plea, a third jolt of electricity was applied and he died. The execution took a total of 14 minutes and his body was left charred and smoldering. In 1989 the state executed Horace Dunkins, who had an IQ of 69. Dunkins was convicted of murdering Lynn McCurry, a 26-year old mother of four. She was found tied to a tree behind her home and stabbed 66 times. In Dunkins’ execution the first jolt of electricity only knocked him unconscious. Charles Jones, the warden at the time, said that because the jacks connecting the electricity to the chair had been reversed, there was not enough voltage to kill him on the first try. Therefore, it took 19 minutes for Horace to die.
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Famous quotes containing the words problems, yellow and/or mama:
“I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!”
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)
“They are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain,—made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My Mama has made bread
and Grampaw has come
and everybody is drunk
and dancing in the kitchen”
—Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)