An essay I wrote a while back for my English class...I was surprised to find it still on my pc, when i knew i deleted all my school homework to have more place for porn
The handcuffs around my hands were tight; the blood didn’t even have the chance to arrive in my fingers. My hands felt numb and kind of dead. My only hope, my only way of escape was that dreadful chair, that abomination of the human fantasy. Imagine 2,000 volts running trough your body, destroying every living tissue until it arrives to your heart. The worst is that you are still alive, enjoying this gruesome theater of pain from the best seat in the house. In such a condition your only and last wish is that the executioner puts a wet sponge on your head so you don’t smell your own burning flesh. Your only escape…your last hope. It’s all embodied in this beautiful image of pure evil.
What is a man but a bundle of emotions, a mixture of fears and urges? Sometimes they just float on the surface as innocently as possible. But sometimes they lurk in the depths of your consciences and just wait to strike, never sleeping- always waiting. So this is why I am here, a mere murder among others- another man walking the green mile, awaiting his date with Sizzlin’ Sally. Why did I kill all those men? I don’t know. Do I deserve to die? I don’t think so. But every moment passed in this damp cell, every second I stare at the gray wall, I get convinced a bit more that death is the only escape. I am not proud of what I did; I don’t consider it something good. Probably if I had a second chance I would never do something like this again. But now it’s too late, isn’t it? I am alone with my thoughts, trapped between these four awful walls just sleeping or reading the whole day. I don’t even get the possibility to leave my prison chamber because prisoners awaiting death penalty are considered too dangerous for the other in-mates. I and all the other men on death row just wait the whole day for the blessed moment when we are finally free. At least, I think that there are other prisoners except me. There is no way I could know as I have never left my cell since the day I was sent to jail. I still remember my trail as it was yesterday, I have all day to think about it and replay it in my head again and again and again. The lights, the screams of pain and solitude coming from the mothers and wives who lost their loved once, they all haunt me every night, keeping me awake, torturing me more then any nightmare can. The pleading speech of the victim’s lawyer still echoed trough my head as the song of a siren- I knew it meant my doom but I just couldn’t stop listening to it.
“Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury; today we stand together here, under one roof as mere humans in the face of horror itself. Who am I to say what is good and what is wrong as I am a mere human like you, this suit doesn’t change the fact that I still have to pull my pants up every morning like the rest of you. But I am sure that there is one thing that makes me fundamentally different from the rest of the people in this room- I am 100%, no, 200% sure that this man isn’t innocent. Of course, what is innocence? Religion tell us that we are all born sinners, that we shall be cleansed by the godly fires of the afterlife, but I know that this man will walk into these same fires and walk out unchanged as his crimes have gotten under his skin and in his heart. You have been witnesses to a gruesome theater, ladies and gentlemen of the jury- you have witnessed how a mere human being has descended to the status of an animal, bestiality driving him mad and making him kill for the mere pleasure. I am not here to convince you that this individual is guilty as I am sure that the evidence speaks clearly for itself. I am here as a mere man, shocked how our so called "civilized society" can still accept such crimes against the human race. I let the choice to you- leave a monster alive, preying on innocent victims, or free the world from this abomination of all we stand for.”
Every time I think of it the pain just races trough my whole body and I feel sick, ready to gag and suffocate on my own vomit. The cell is just so small, but it seems that the chair is my only escape. But who could create a contraption so inhuman and evil? I read somewhere that it was Alfred P. Southwick who developed the idea of using electric current as a method of execution after having witnessed an intoxicated man die after having touched an exposed terminal on a live generator. As Southwick was a dentist accustomed to performing procedures on subjects in chairs, his electrical device appeared in the form of a chair. The first electric chair was made by Harold P. Brown. Brown was an employee of Thomas Edison. His job was researching the different type of electricity and development of the electric chair. Since Brown worked for Edison and it's Edison himself who promoted Brown’s work, a lot of people thought that it was Edison who invented the chair and not Brown. Brown's design was based on alternating current as invented by George Whitehouse, which was then just emerging as Edison’s rival in the creation of electricity, alongside Tesla of course. The decision to use AC was partly driven by Edison's claims that AC was more lethal than the normal high-efficiency direct current; however at the very high currents used for the device, which could be as high as ten amperes, the difference in lethality between the two types of currents was approximately a factor of two, which was more then enough to prove his point. The term "electrocution" originally referred only to electrical execution and not to accidental electrical deaths. However, since no English word was available for the latter process, with the new rise of commercial electricity, the word "electrocution" eventually took over as a description of all circumstances of electrical death. Just imagine, all that electricity running trough your body; the pain taking control of every sensor in your brain and your mouth trying to form words, to yell for help, but it can’t because you’re frying on the inside. Prison-life has given me a lot of time to read, read about the gruesome death that awaits me.
I have never wanted to kill those people; I have never wanted to end up on the electric chair. When I was still free I was firmly against the death penalty. I found it a gruesome and inhuman way of punishing someone. They say that the Bible states: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth”. But isn’t God the one who teaches us that people can change and that there is place for everyone in heaven? Why should we put ourselves in the place of the murderers and fall to their level just for a pitiful vengeance? Are we no better then animals who jump at each others neck at the least occasion? If I could go back in time I would try to repair all this, all the pain the human race has suffered from its own hand. Why should we kill our brothers and sisters? Then I thought everything was so simple, so clear and easy to explain. I didn’t understand the pain that the victims endured, what inhuman crimes were being committed everyday all over the world. Then I thought that killing someone was more or less a way to give up on your humanity and join the lines of demons, turn your back on everything that society has thought you. I was sure that those people mustn’t be punished as killing them will only free them from their suffering. Why give them the satisfaction to watch us fall to their own level and pull on that lever? Why not stick them in a cell, somewhere deep in a prison, where there is no escape, where there is no hope. Because when the hope dies, the human dies. When a person doesn’t see a way to continue his life and has the same four walls around him every god damn day, he starts thinking. And let me tell you, there is nothing worse then a human who has too much free time and nothing to do because he starts to question himself, he starts to question his sanity and he starts to question existence. God has abandoned them long time ago and the only thing left is the agonizing feeling of emptiness, the little space their humanity had occupied couple of gun-shots ago.
I fully understand how true my ideas were back then. Now, when I question my existence, when I stopped counting the days I have spent in prison, when I am left alone- rejected from all humanity, I see how self-destructing this emptiness can be. I am glad I live in a state that still uses the death penalty as an ultimate measure; I can finally escape this hell that is I. My salvation is only one switch away, only 2,000 volts out of reach. I can taste freedom already and strangely enough it tastes like cooked flesh.