Preview

Strapped onto a massive chair in a room gradually filling with gas fumes, a husky, 20-year-old Negro in white trunks coughed, clenched his fists, expanded his chest and fiercely cried: "Joe Louis!" Such was the death two years ago of Allen Foster, first criminal to be executed in the lethal gas chamber of the North Carolina State Prison at Raleigh. The Foster execution lasted eleven minutes, provoked a storm of newspaper criticism. Today lethal gas executions are legal in six States besides North Carolina--Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, Missouri, Wyoming, and Cali-fornia--and are increasingly efficient, but to many conservative criminals and laymen alike the humdrum noose or electric chair still seems safer.

Last week 30 spectators flattened their noses curiously, against a bullet-proof glass wall in California's San Quentin prison to watch a preview of a lethal chamber which its makers, Eaton Metal Products Co. of Denver, thought would end all such doubt. Resting on a chair inside was a cage in which waited a small, reddish-brown pig. When a lever was pulled, dropping 16 cyanide eggs into pans of sulfuric acid, thin blue fumes began to rise toward the cage. The pig jumped, squealed, flapped its ears, rolled over. Like Allen Foster, the San Quentin pig died hard. Nine times the pig staggered to its feet and collapsed. The ninth time, three minutes and 25 seconds later, its corkscrew tail straightened out rigid in death. After the gas was blown out and the pig removed, opinions remained divided. Most of the newspapermen spectators professed themselves horrified. Queasy Warden Court Smith confessed that he had turned his eyes away. But W. H. Rockingham of the State Department of Architecture, who had supervised the construction of the chamber, expressed his satisfaction, announced that he would recommend that the State accept the chamber and pay the contractors their $4,950 fee. The five men in San Quentin's death row scheduled to enter the chamber next, thought Mr. Rockingham, should die in 15 seconds.

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