The air in the execution chamber was thick with a desperate, unspoken prayer, not for salvation, but for a vein. For two agonizing hours on a September day in 2009 at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, executioners plunged needles into the body of Romell Broom, attempting to find a suitable vessel for the lethal injection that was meant to end his life. They tried 18 times.
They stabbed at his arms. They jabbed at his legs. They struck bone.
The process descended into a grotesque medical nightmare, a scene of suffering that left Broom, convicted for the 1984 abduction and murder of 14-year-old Tryna Middleton, writhing in agony before the execution was finally called off.
This botched procedure, a stark violation of the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment according to critics, did not ultimately save Romell Broom. The state of Ohio fought for years to try again. In 2016, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that a second execution attempt would not constitute unconstitutional punishment.
But fate intervened before the state could schedule a new date. On December 28, 2020, Romell Broom died in his prison cell. He did not cheat the executioner’s needle; he was simply overtaken by a more mundane, yet equally final, killer: complications related to COVID-19.
Broom’s story is a modern testament to the horrifying unpredictability of state-sanctioned death, but History’s archives are filled with far stranger cases of men and women who, through a confluence of mechanical failure, human error, or sheer luck, stood at the precipice of eternity and were pulled back. One of the most bizarre cases involves a man known as “the man they could not hang.” In 1885, John Babbacombe Lee, a British butler convicted of murdering his employer, Miss Emma Keyse, stood on the scaffold at Exeter Prison.
The trap door was tested. It worked perfectly. Lee took his place, the noose snug around his neck.
The lever was pulled. Nothing happened. The mechanism, with Lee’s weight on it, simply refused to function.
The executioner, a Mr. Berry, was aghast. Lee was returned to his cell.
The mechanism was inspected and tested again, operating without a flaw. Lee was brought back to the scaffold. The lever was pulled a second time.
The trap door remained firmly shut. The silence in the death chamber was broken by sheer, disbelieving panic. A third attempt was made, with officials watching in stunned silence as the trap door failed once more.
The Home Secretary, viewing the incident as an act of divine providence, commuted Lee’s sentence to life imprisonment. He served 22 years, becoming a national celebrity known as “John Lee, the man they could not hang.”
Across the Atlantic, another bizarre mechanical failure occurred in 1946 at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. A 17-year-old African-American boy named Willie Francis was strapped into “Gruesome Gertie,” the state’s portable electric chair. His crime: the murder of a white pharmacy owner, a conviction whose guilt has been disputed by modern historians.
The executioner pulled the switch. The chair delivered a jolt of electricity, but it was not enough to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. Witnesses reported hearing a muffled, desperate scream from beneath the leather hood.
“Take it off! Take it off! Let me breathe!”
Francis cried out as he was violently shocked and severely burned, but remained alive.
The reason for the malfunction was discovered to be a tragic and almost unbelievable error: a drunk prison guard had improperly prepared the chair, failing to remove a piece of cardboard that was used as a spacer. The case went all the way to the U. S.
Supreme Court, which controversially ruled that a second execution attempt would not violate the prohibition of double jeopardy, as the first attempt was not a completed punishment. Against a backdrop of public outcry and legal appeals, Willie Francis was executed exactly one year later, on May 9, 1947. This time, the chair worked perfectly.
Perhaps no case captures the sheer defiance of death under the most primitive of methods than that of Wenseslao Moguel, a soldier in the Mexican Revolution. In 1915, after being captured by government forces, Moguel was sentenced to death by firing squad without a trial. He was shot multiple times at close range.
To ensure finality, a commanding officer walked up to his crumpled, bleeding body and delivered a coup de grâce, a single shot to the head. Moguel was left for dead among his fallen comrades. The next morning, he regained consciousness.
He was found wandering, dazed and bleeding, a human being who had absorbed a fusillade of bullets and a point-blank headshot and survived.
Stories differ on whether he crawled away or was found by doctors, but the fact remains: Moguel recovered. He returned to Mexico and lived for another 61 years. He was given a nickname that forever defined his existence: “El Fusilado,” meaning “The Executed One.”
He became a living, breathing marvel, a man who had been officially processed by the machinery of death and had walked away from it. His survival is a stark reminder that even the most final of procedures, the firing squad, is not always absolute.
The history of capital punishment is littered with these grotesque anomalies, moments where the system designed to bring a definitive end becomes a stage for a miracle. Consider the case of Anne Green, a young English servant in 1650. She was convicted of infanticide after her newborn child died, a case built on flimsy circumstantial evidence.
She was hanged at Oxford Castle. The executioner, drunk on the job according to reports, pulled on her legs to ensure she was dead. Her body was pronounced dead and cut down, then taken to the anatomy school of a Dr.
William Petty for dissection.
As the medical students began their grisly work, preparing to cut open her chest, they heard a sound. A rattle. A breath.
Then, a cough. The students, in sheer terror, saw the corpse’s chest begin to rise and fall. They immediately stopped their work and began resuscitation efforts.
Within days, Anne Green had fully recovered. Her survival was seen as a clear act of God, a sign that she had been wrongly convicted. She was pardoned.
She lived another 15 years, married, and had three children, a perfect counter-narrative to the grim finality of the execution yard.
In the annals of Australian penal history, the case of Joseph Samuel stands out as a monument to mechanical absurdity. A convict transported from England after being convicted of robbery and murder, Samuel was sentenced to hang in Sydney in 1803. On the appointed day, the rope was placed around his neck.
The executioner pulled the lever. The rope snapped, sending Samuel crashing to the ground. Undeterred, the authorities strung him up again.
A second rope was procured. The drop was attempted. The rope broke a second time.
By now, a crowd of spectators and officials was in a state of pandemonium. A third rope was procured, stronger than the last. The executioner made a third attempt.
The rope slipped, and Samuel fell, landing on his feet, completely unharmed. The authorities, recognizing the supernatural implication of such a failure, finally relented. Samuel was taken back to prison.
His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He had escaped the noose three times in a single day, a record of serial failure for the state that he miraculously survived.
Then there is the story of Alfred Packer, an American prospector and guide. In the brutal winter of 1873, Packer was the sole survivor of a group of five men stranded in the Colorado Rockies. When he was found, he was well-fed.
The remains of his companions had been partially eaten. He was accused of murder and cannibalism. He was tried and sentenced to hang.
But his case was plagued by legal irregularities. The trial was a mess. The appeals dragged on for years.
By the time the legal system was ready for a final, definitive execution, the state of Colorado had officially abolished the death penalty. The timing was almost poetic. Packer’s sentence was commuted to 40 years in prison.
He served only 15, a far cry from the gallows. He walked out of prison a free man, a living example of how a legal technicality can be a more effective “survival” tactic than any faulty rope or malfunctioning chair. The pieces of the puzzle are all there, spread across centuries and continents.
The flawed needle. The stubborn trapdoor. The broken rope.
The drunk guard. The legal loophole.
Each case represents a microscopic crack in the daunting wall of state power. It is the story of the condemned man who wheezes back to life on the dissection table, the teenager who screams from the electric chair, and the soldier who rises from a pile of bodies with a bullet in his brain. They teach a terrifying and exhilarating lesson: the machinery of death is not infallible.
As we reflect on these harrowing escapes, the question is inevitably personal. In that final, silent moment, as the clock ticks down, what would the rest of us do? Would you place your trust in a clever legal argument, a last-minute plea to a governor, or a piece of rope that might, just might, break?
The stories of those who have returned from the precipice suggest that the line between life and eternity is often terrifyingly thin.
