In 1940, Mississippi was really proud of its brand new electric chair
And its traveling, tattooed executioner, Jimmy Thompson
By Tim Townsend
On Sunday, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe gutted a bill that would have allowed the state to use the electric chair when controversial lethal injection drugs are unavailable from traditional drug companies.
“We take human beings, we strap them into a chair, and then we flood their bodies with 1800 volts of electricity, subjecting them to unspeakable pain until they die,” McAuliffe told reporters Monday. “Virginia citizens do not want their commonwealth to revert back to a past when excessively inhumane punishments were committed in their name.”
Instead, McAuliffe’s solution is to allow Virginia to contract with a compounding pharmacy to whip up a batch of lethal injection drugs in secret.
Seven decades ago, southern political leaders had no such misgivings about the electric chair. In a photo caption from the October 1940 issue of Life, headlined “Mississippi gets a fancy portable electric chair and a tattooed executioner,” editors pointed out that the state legislature had recently voted “to abandon the traditional rope” and buy an electric chair for $4,000 (or $68,000 today).
There were 48 states then and 23 of them had moved to the more “humane” method of electric executions. Eleven were still hanging people and eight were using “lethal gas.” (Six didn’t have the death penalty.) Today eight states — including Virginia, but not Mississippi —allow electrocution as a secondary execution method.
Mississippi leaders were so proud of their new contraption in 1940 — “a sturdy chair complete with helmet, straps and electrodes” — that they put it on display in a big silver truck outside the state capitol in Jackson.
Standing next to it was Mississippi’s new, smiling executioner, Jimmy Thompson, “ex-sailor, marine, carnival man and high-tension expert,” with tattoos of a black cat, snakes and strawberries on his “velvety skin.”
Thompson told Life that “he and his volts would travel from county to county as business required.” His fee per job: $100. That’s about $1,700 today. No word how much Virginia will pay its secret compounding pharmacies for the same work.
