Opera-loving woman becomes last victim of 'Yellow Mama'

To the usual wave of public indifference, Lynda Block, who killed a policeman nine years ago, was herself killed in an Alabama jail yesterday, the 25th person to be executed in the US this year. However, she is likely to earn a special footnote in history as the last person ever to suffer that most American of deaths: the electric chair.

Alabama is replacing electrocution as its favoured means of capital punishment, leaving Nebraska, where executions are rare, as the only state that prescribes it. Nebraska is expected to follow suit shortly. After 102 years, one of the most grisly traditions of US law enforcement is about to die.

Block, 54, was strapped into Alabama's brightly-painted chair, known as "Yellow Mama", and, just after midnight, subjected to a 2,050-volt charge for 20 seconds, then a further 250 volts for 100 seconds. Witnesses saw her body tense, and steam rise from the sponge on her head and the electrode on her left leg.

She refused a last meal and said nothing. "She never displayed any emotion," the Alabama police commissioner, Mike Haley, said. "Her stare was a very blank stare, an emotionless stare."

It was Alabama's first execution of a woman since 1957, and the US's first this year.

Block was no ordinary killer. She was a wife and mother who loved the opera and did volunteer work in her local library in Florida before joining a libertarian group that claimed to have seceded from the country.

She claimed to have shot the policeman who was questioning her companion in self-defence, because he had his hand on his holster. However, she refused to appeal, saying that she was willing to "die for the constitution".

It is the constitution that has put paid to Yellow Mama. Though the supreme court has upheld the legality of executions, it has hinted that the electric chair could be covered by the eighth amendment, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment". There have been several botched electrocutions, including one in Florida in 1990 where Jesse Tafero had flames, sparks and smoke coming out of his hood. In Alabama, Horace Dunkins reportedly burned to death because the cables were wrongly connected.

Almost all American executions now take place using lethal injection. A diminishing handful of states offer the chair, the gas chamber, hanging, or (in Utah) the firing squad as alternatives, but these are now only likely to be used if the inmate insists.

"There is a remote possibility that someone might choose to be electrocuted, perhaps to embarrass the state," said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Centre. "But I feel confident in saying this is the last person who will not have the choice."

The first person killed by this method was William Kemmler, in New York in 1890. The New York Times reported at the time that his death took two shocks and he was left singed and bloody. However, for decades it was the most popular method of execution.

A further 15 death row inmates in the US are scheduled for execution in the next three months. However, enthusiasm for executions is waning. This week Maryland followed Illinois in announcing a halt, pending a review. Its governor, Parris Glendening, said he was troubled by the disproportionate use of death sentences against blacks.

The supreme court is expected to rule shortly on the legitimacy of executing people with learning disabilities.

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