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The last gasp of the American gas chamber came in 1999 in Florence, Arizona. Ironically, and fittingly some might think, the case involved the United States and Germany. Two brothers, Walter and Karl LaGrand, were German nationals who were both sentenced for stabbing to death a bank manager during a botched robbery. After the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied review, the LaGrands filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus. Arizona law gave the condemned the right to choose between lethal injection or lethal gas as their method of execution. Both brothers chose gas in the hope that the courts would find the method unconstitutional. When this tactic failed, Karl accepted a last-minute offer of a lethal injection, and he was executed on February 24, 1999. Walter, however, said he would prefer lethal gas as a means of protesting the death penalty. Walter LaGrand turned out to be the last person to be executed by lethal gas in the twentieth century. The lethal chamber had taken its final victim.

This book traces the dreadful history of the gas chamber, providing both a step-by-step account of its operations and an analysis of the factors that contributed to its rise and fall. It recounts some of the scientific, political, and legal background leading up to the adoption of lethal gas, describes the executions, and outlines the struggle to abolish the use of gas-chamber executions. Although the Holocaust figures prominently in this history, most of this book focuses on its reign in the United States. The lethal chamber, later called the execution gas chamber or homicidal gas chamber, was originally envisioned before Adolf Hitler was born. The earliest gas chamber for execution purposes was constructed in the Nevada State Penitentiary at Carson City and first employed on February 8, 1924. The specter of the gas chamber evoked revulsion throughout the world and eventually contributed to the ongoing decline in America's resort to the death penalty. Nazi Germany appropriated the evolving American method of gas-chamber executions and embellished upon it with unfettered ferocity.

In 1929, Nevada prison officials tore down the original death house and built a more elaborate structure using convict labor. In response to the safety concerns posed by the first lethal gassing, the designers had devised a sealed compartment to fit inside the building. Given all of the problems with employing liquid cyanide and the crude gas-delivery system used in the first execution, Nevada authorities tried to be more careful in selecting the type of lethal gas they would employ in future executions. The newest and most potent form of cyanide gas in the United States came from Germany. The product was called Zyklon. Nevada's shiny new gas chamber was inaugurated on June 2, 1930, on Bob White, who had been condemned for killing a fellow gambler at Elko. In the face of new refinements in gas-chamber design and fumigation, other states also began to consider switching to gas. One of them was Arizona, which amended its constitution to provide for the death penalty to be inflicted by administering lethal gas.

By the late 1970s, public opinion in the United States was swinging ever more strongly in favor of the death penalty. Although the public's appetite for gas chambers had diminished, eleven states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico (until 1978), North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wyoming—still clung to that method of capital punishment. But the legal battle over the constitutionality of lethal gas executions, and the rise of the new method of lethal injection, were just beginning to take hold. Henry Schwarzschild, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project, served as one of the key national players in the anti-death penalty movement in the late 1970s. After John Spenkelink's execution, attention shifted to Jesse Walter Bishop and Jimmy Lee Gray. One by one, states had backed away from the continued use of the gas chamber, usually substituting lethal injection instead.

Five months after the enactment of Nevada's Humane Execution Law, prosecutors identified a crime with all the makings of a ready-made test case. It occurred on the evening of August 21, 1921 in Mina, a tiny copper mining boomtown gone bust, when Tom Quong Kee, a seventy-four-year-old laundryman and nominal member of the Bing Kung Tong, was shot dead. The suspects were two Chinese men, Hughie Sing and Gee Jon, who were convicted by a jury convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die by lethal gas. In the end, Hughie Sing was spared, but not Gee Jon, who went on to become the first person in the world to be legally executed by lethal gas. Hydrocyanic acid was introduced into the lethal chamber, killing Gee Jon. Word that Americans had become the first to use the gas chamber to execute a human being flashed across the world, including Germany where the right-wing Bavarian radical Adolf Hitler was awaiting trial at the People's Court in Munich for his role in the failed November 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The traumas of World War II had sensitized many nations to the need for international standards of human rights and the treatment of prisoners. Millions of prisoners of war and civilians had died or been murdered in captivity, both during the war and after. Britain's Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, appointed in May 1949, undertook what was to that point the most exhaustive study of capital punishment. Although its 500-page public report, issued in 1953, did not directly argue for abolition of the death penalty, it did question its underlying rationales, including the principle of deterrence, which was becoming so crucial in the nuclear arms race. Based on scientific review, the panel further concluded that executions by lethal gas, electrocution, or lethal injection were no more “humane” than killing by hanging. In the United States, serious consideration of abolition was slower in coming, for political reasons. Litanies involving gas chamber executions were not so readily invoked in cold war America.

In 1940 and 1941, the Americans remained mired in the Great Depression and deeply worried about their future. Freedom, democracy, and prosperity were very much in peril. Fascism already had swept Italy, Germany, Spain and other parts of the globe, and many of the seeds required for fascism to flower in the United States, some warned, were already planted. European social scientists had followed the Nazis' rise to power with awe. Many Americans figured they had “modernized” the death penalty by having the state take over executions, moving them inside prisons instead of making them such a mob spectacle, and changing the method of execution from grisly hangings to mechanical, clinical, and scientific procedures. Blacks during the Depression suffered disproportionately from poverty, discrimination, and harsh criminal penalties. Ideas based on eugenics continued to exert a significant influence on the administration of American justice, as reflected in the race, ethnicity, and mental status of the accused, as well as the eugenic approaches of segregation, exclusion, and execution by lethal gas.