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Choose Your Execution: Tennessee Death Row Inmates Request Firing Squad Over Alternatives

Four Tennessee death row inmates challenging the constitutionality of capital punishment in their state are asking a federal judge to allow them to bypass lethal injections or the electric chair in favor of another method: death by firing squad.

By Richard Gonzales

Four Tennessee death row inmates challenging the constitutionality of capital punishment in their state are asking a federal judge to allow them to bypass lethal injections or the electric chair in favor of another method: death by firing squad.

The request came in a lawsuit filed Friday, following the execution of 63-year-old Edmund Zagorski, who died Thursday night in the electric chair, a method he had requested instead of death by lethal injection.

Zagorski's attorneys had argued that electrocution was quicker and less painful than the three-drug lethal injection protocol used by Tennessee and denounced by some experts as a form of torture. Zagorski was executed after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal asking the high court to rule on the constitutionality of forcing him to choose between lethal injection and electrocution. It was one of several approaches Zagorski tried as he challenged his death sentence.

The four inmates include David Earl Miller, who is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 6 for the 1981 rape and murder of a 23-year-old mentally handicapped woman in Knoxville. Miller is Tennessee's longest-standing death row inmate.

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