jay chapman. in 1977, he was the chief medical examiner for the state of oklahoma. well, dr. chapman learned that gary gilmore had been learned to be killed by firing squad over the electric chair, he lamented with his colleagues in the field of corrections that both of those options seemed terrible and inhumane. he said it was ridiculous the technology that we had in this country to put people to death. quote, he said, we kill animals more humanely than we kill people. that's what dr. jay chapman said at the time. this is a chart showing how much we've used different methods of execution throughout the history of our country. all that red, that's either hanging or firing squad. you can see by 1977, booet of those methods were on their way out of fashion. leading up to that decade-long moratorium on the death penalty, we really preferred electrocution. that's all the yellow on this graph. that was basically the default method, the electric chair. but around this time period, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the death penalty was coming back, we were struggling to justif