The teen death row inmate who was executed twice
The teen death row inmate who was executed twice On execution day, executioners strapped Willie into “Gruesome Gertie,” the electric chair that had been used to execute twenty-three people; he convulsed and screamed, but did not die. The portable electric chair, known as “Gruesome Gertie,” was found to have been improperly set up by an intoxicated prison guard and inmate from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. When the sheriff ordered the electricity shut off, Willie was taken back to his cell, spared and hopeful. Reflecting on the experience afterward, Willie wrote: I didn’t think about my whole life like at the picture show. Just, ‘Willie, you’re going outta this world in this bad chair.’ Sometimes I thought it so loud it hurt my head and when they put the #black bag over my head I was all locked up inside the bag with the loud thinking . . . I felt a burning in my head and my left leg and I jumped against the straps. When the straps kept cutting me I hoped I was alive a...
