When Gary Gilmore was choosing between the firing squad and the electric chair in 1977, Dr. Jay Chapman remembers discussing the inhumanity of each option with his colleagues at the Oklahoma state medical examiner's office."We said this is really ridiculous. We kill animals more humanely than we kill people," said Chapman.
But Chapman, then the chief medical examiner in Oklahoma, supported the death penalty. So when state legislators asked him to come up with a more humane alternative, he went to work.