Jimmy Lee Gray: The 1983 Execution That Turned Mississippi Against the Gas Chamber
Updated: 5 days ago
At ten past midnight on 2 September 1983, cyanide gas rose under a steel chair in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. The man strapped into it, Jimmy Lee Gray, had murdered a three-year-old girl. Almost nobody in the state thought he should be spared.
Eight minutes later, prison staff ordered the witnesses out of the room. Gray was still moving. What they’d watched in those eight minutes is the reason Mississippi stopped gassing people.
Quick Answers
Who was Jimmy Lee Gray? A twice-convicted murderer executed by Mississippi on 2 September 1983, aged 34.
What did he do? He murdered three-year-old Deressa Jean Scales in Pascagoula in June 1976, while on parole for killing his teenage girlfriend in Arizona.
Why is his execution remembered? Witnesses saw him gasp, convulse and strike his head on a steel pole for eight minutes before they were removed.
Did officials accept it went wrong? No. They said he was dead within two minutes and that the movements were involuntary.
What changed? In 1984 Mississippi adopted lethal injection for everyone sentenced after 1 July that year.
Was the executioner drunk? That claim was first published in 1995. It wasn’t reported at the time.
The First Murder
In 1968 Gray was 19 and living in Parker, Arizona. The family of his 16-year-old girlfriend, Elda Louise Prince, had taken him in and borrowed money to buy him school clothes. He killed her. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was given 20 years to life.
He served seven and was paroled in 1975. He moved to Pascagoula on the Mississippi coast.
The Murder of Deressa Scales
On the afternoon of 25 June 1976, Deborah Scales sent her three-year-old daughter Deressa out to play at the Captain Grant Apartments and told her to be back in ten minutes. Deressa often visited a neighbour’s flat to play with his cats. The neighbour was Gray.
When she didn’t come home, her parents searched and then called the police. Gray told her father he hadn’t seen her. Officers found him that night at the hamburger restaurant where his girlfriend worked and took him in for a statement. In the lift at the police station he offered to show them where she was.
He led them 25 to 30 miles to a bridge over Black Creek. Her body was found in the water at about 4.30am. Gray had sodomised her, held her head down in a muddy drainage ditch until she suffocated and then thrown her body from the bridge. The post-mortem found that she’d died from inhaling mud and that she hadn’t drowned. Gray’s own account changed more than once.
Two Trials and Seven Years of Appeals
Gray was convicted and sentenced to death, but in November 1977 the Mississippi Supreme Court threw the verdict out. Among other errors, the jury had been told he was on parole and the judge had stopped him addressing the jury himself. He was retried in 1978, convicted again and sentenced to death again. That verdict was upheld in September 1979.
His own mother didn’t want him saved. In January 1977 Verna Smith wrote to the governor asking him not to commute the sentence. “A jury of 12 people found him guilty. How can I question that?” she said.
The appeals went on regardless. By the summer of 1983 more than 50 judges had heard some part of the case. His lawyers’ final argument was about the method. They filed a statement from Dr Richard Traystman of Johns Hopkins, who said a person breathing cyanide gas could stay conscious for minutes and take 10 to 12 minutes to die, and that his own laboratory wouldn’t use it on research animals.
The appeals court accepted those facts for the sake of argument and ruled they still didn’t make the gas chamber unconstitutional. On 1 September the US Supreme Court refused to step in. Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting, called it “unconscionable” to let the execution go ahead before the court had considered the question properly.
2 September 1983
Mississippi hadn’t executed anyone since 1964. Gray would be the eighth person put to death in the United States since executions resumed in 1977.
His last meal was Mexican food from the prison kitchen plus a pizza brought in by six visiting ministers, who shared it with him and gave him communion. He made no final statement.
He was strapped in by 12.10am. The executioner, a school caretaker called T. Berry Bruce who’d held the job since the chamber was built in 1955, pulled the lever. UPI’s Dan Lohwasser, watching through the glass, reported what followed. Within a minute Gray’s head dropped and he looked unconscious. Then it jerked back. He strained against the straps, clenched his fists and groaned. Three times his head fell forward and three times it snapped up again, hitting a steel pole behind the chair with a clang the witnesses could hear.
At 12.18am an assistant warden cleared the witness room. Gray’s eyes were open and his head was still moving.
Two Versions of What Happened
The state’s account was that nothing had gone wrong. Corrections commissioner Morris Thigpen said doctors listening through a remote stethoscope found no heartbeat after two minutes, and that everything after that was reflex. He described it as “a prompt and easy death”. Gray wasn’t formally pronounced dead until 12.47am.
His lawyer, Dennis Balske, had been in the witness room. “That man was breathing when I was told to leave,” he said.
The line most often quoted about the execution, that Gray died banging his head on a pole while reporters counted his moans, is regularly credited to Balske. It was written by another defence lawyer, David Bruck, in the New Republic in 1984.
Deressa’s father, Richard Scales, said he was glad it was over and that justice should have been done years earlier. Gray was buried at sunrise the same day in a location the funeral home wouldn’t disclose.
One later claim needs handling with care. In 1995 Esquire reported that Bruce had been drunk that night. The Death Penalty Information Center repeats it in its list of botched executions, but it rests on that one article.
The End of the Gas Chamber
The protests that followed went well beyond Mississippi. In April 1984 the legislature replaced gas with lethal injection for anyone sentenced after 1 July that year. Velma Barfield became the first American woman to die that way a few months later, in North Carolina.
People already on Mississippi’s death row were still bound for the chamber. Edward Earl Johnson and Connie Ray Evans were gassed in 1987 and Leo Edwards in 1989. In 1998 the law was changed again so that every condemned prisoner would be executed by injection.
You Might Also Like
Sources
United Press International report on Gray’s burial and his lawyers’ response, 3 September 1983
Dan Lohwasser, “Condemned killer resigned to execution”, United Press International, 31 August 1983
Gray v. State, 375 So. 2d 994 (Mississippi Supreme Court, 1979)
Gray v. State, 351 So. 2d 1342 (Mississippi Supreme Court, 1977)
