NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee inmate is scheduled Thursday evening to become the second person to die in the state's electric chair in as many months.
The execution plan comes nearly two decades after Tennessee adopted lethal injection. But 61-year-old David Earl Miller chose the electric chair as allowed by authorities. The last inmate to choose the chair, Edmund Zagorksi, was executed Nov. 1.
Both had unsuccessfully argued in court that Tennessee's lethal injection method causes a prolonged and torturous death.
Miller was convicted of the 1981 killing of a 23-year-old mentally handicapped woman, Lee Standifer, in Knoxville. Miller has spent 36 years on death row, the longest of any Tennessee inmate.
