No one who has seen The Green Mile will ever forget the scene in which the malevolent death row guard, Percy Wetmore, causes a malfunction of the electric chair to deliberately torture inmate Eduard Delacroix, who had laughed when Percy was humiliated in an earlier incident on the row. Percy's "get-even" prank goes wild: Del's body bursts into flame and has to be put out with a fire extinguisher, leaving the witnesses puking and running for the door. "Is it always like this?" one asks.

In real life, Florida's electric chair has a history of malfunctions going back a decade. During the May 4, 1990, electrocution of Jesse Joseph Tafero, six-inch flames erupted from Tafero's head. The state blamed the problem on a synthetic sponge. In the May 25, 1997, electrocution of Pedro Medina, a blue and orange flame up to a foot long shot out from the right side of Medina's face. The execution chamber filled with smoke and the odor of burnt flesh. Florida later installed a new electric chair. When Allen Lee Davis was executed in it, on July 8, 1999, blood poured from his mouth to form a large stain on the front of his shirt.

Were these executions effective? Yes, all three men died. Were these executions gruesome? In the eyes of the witnesses and the courts who looked at the execution procedures, yes. Was this a bad thing? The answer depends on whom you ask; many Americans would probably say no. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, who had already gone on record opposing lethal injection, saying, "A painless death is not punishment," said after the Medina execution, "People who wish to commit murder, they better not do it in the state of Florida because we may have a problem with our electric chair." AG Butterworth's words support the historical view that the deterrent effect of the death penalty is enhanced by making the execution a painful public spectacle.

Such executions abound in early America. Hanging predominated, the simple and expedient mode for ordinary criminals, but more imaginative deaths awaited those of whom the authorities--more often local than state in those days--wanted to make examples. A black man who killed a Frenchman in 1722 colonial Louisiana was burned alive. Several slaves who took part in a small-scale insurrection a few years later were broken on the wheel. This involved being tied spreadeagled to a wheel, having their bones broken with a heavy hammer, and being deprived of food or water until they died.

Jackson Square in New Orleans is one of the city's prime tourist attractions, the heart of the French Quarter. In the old days, it was the scene of public executions, including some in which criminals were reportedly tortured by being tied to a cannon barrel and roasted alive over an open fire. Up the river from New Orleans, a large scale slave rebellion in 1811 resulted in one of the unique episodes in the history of executions in America. When the slaves were defeated in battle by the militia, most of the slaves who survived ran away. The 16 who were captured alive were beheaded in the square in New Orleans, and their heads were put on poles along the Mississippi River "to serve as a terrifying warning to others held in bondage," according to execution historian Watt Espy.

Espy's archives also contain an account of an even stranger execution in colonial times. In 1754, the soldiers of the French garrison at Cat Island murdered their commander and deserted. When several of the mutineers were captured by Choctaw Indians and returned to French custody, Governor Kerlerec determined to make an example of the ringleaders. Three of them were broken on the wheel. It was the execution of the fourth, a Swiss mercenary, that Espy calls "possibly the most bizarre in the annals of American capital punishment." This man was nailed alive in a wooden box, like a coffin, and then sawed in half. To enhance deterrence, the other Swiss mercenaries were ordered to serve as the executioners, carrying out their function with a crosscut saw.

In time these gruesome forms of execution were replaced by more sanitary, less painful methods carried out behind prison walls, with only a few invited witnesses present. Even Florida, despite (or because of) the menace posed by its electric chair, eventually replaced electrocution by lethal injection, as all other states currently carrying out executions have done. Some television stations have petitioned for the right to carry executions live, and some murderers have asked to be executed on live TV, but thus far no state has allowed live coverage of an execution. If the death penalty is a deterrent, as the early proponents of painful public death argued, then shouldn't we look at this idea seriously? We already have enough people on death row to have one execution a day for the next ten years. Seven o'clock every night, on prime time TV, could be the execution hour: "Live--for a few more minutes--from death row . . . ."