Great Moments In Irony: The Death Of Charles Justice

Though it was first invented in New York State, perhaps the most interesting story of the electric chair comes from Ohio:

In 1900, Charles Justice was a prison inmate at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. While performing cleaning detail duties in the death chamber, he devised an idea to improve the efficiency of the restraints on the electric chair. Justice designed metal clamps to replace the leather straps, thus allowing for the inmate to be secured more tautly and minimize the problem of burnt flesh. These revisions were incorporated into the chair and Justice was subsequently paroled from prison. Ironically, he was convicted in a robbery/murder and returned to prison 11 years later under a death sentence. On November 9, 1911, he died in the same electric chair that he had helped to improve.

[From wikipedia.org]