Willie Francis

They say there was one other case from 1946.

Florida teenager Willie Francis survived being electrocuted in the electric chair.

He was just 17 years old.

Next year at 18, tried it again.

They say there was one other case from 1946.

Florida teenager Willie Francis survived being electrocuted in the electric chair.

He was just 17 years old.

Next year at 18, tried it again.

There was even one other case.

They say there was one other case, um, from 1946, Florida teenager, Willie Francis, survived being electrocuted in the electric chair.

He was just 17 years old.

Next year at 18, tried it again.

Collins.completely unrelated.

So 15-year-old Willie Francis was the youngest of 13 children in a poor Black family living in St. Martinville, Louisiana, um, that at the time only had about 4,000 residents.

Mm-hmm.

And so, uh, this, we're just gonna fast-forward right to the event here.

Uh, just before I read this I do wanna preface this by saying that this is [laughs] gonna be, I'm gonna trip on this so many times because it's not exactly, uh, it's not exactly brilliantly written.

Um, let me just have a go at it.

Uh, "I, Willie Francis, now 16 years old, I stole the gun from Mr. Ageese.

Uh-

They say there was one other case, um, from 1946.

Florida teenager Willie Francis survived being electrocuted in the electric chair.

He was just 17 years old.

Next year at 18, tried it again.

And that's actually happened before in this country, just never quite like this.

So, for context, in 1946, a Louisiana teenager named Willie Francis survived the electric chair, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state could try again, so they did the following year.

In 2009, Ohio couldn't find a vein on a man named Romell Broom after about two hours of trying, and he spent the rest of his life fighting a second attempt.

He ultimately died in prison in 2020 before they ever tried again.

There is Supreme Court precedent for allowing them to try again.

But that was in the Willie Francis case from 1946.

So we're not talking recent.

And his case was a little bit different because he survived the electric chair.

It didn't work, so d- we can't go do that again.

Well, there's a case in the Willie Francis case, which is in Louisiana.

Jim covered this one on, on Bloody Angola.

But he was 17, and he survived the electric chair, not because he withstood the electricity, but because of a malfunction in the chair.