Willie Mae Bragg was sentenced to death in the United States for murdering a pharmacist in 1939
Willie Mae Bragg was sentenced to death in the United States for murdering a pharmacist in 1939.
On the day of his execution, he was strapped into the electric chair—but when the current surged, it failed to kill him. His screams weren’t pleas for mercy—they were demands to have his restraints removed.
Surviving what should have been a fatal execution, Bragg filed a lawsuit, arguing that he could not legally be executed again since he had already “been executed” and survived. It was a bizarre and ominous legal claim.
Sadly, his appeal was denied. In 1940, he was executed again—this time successfully—using a portable electric chair. The case stands as a haunting footnote in the history of capital punishment, a grim reminder of the era’s brutality and the deep racial inequities in Mississippi, where most executions of the 1940s were of Black people.

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