 America's experiment with executing people continues, thanks to Alabama. I'm Bill Newman, and this is the Civil Liberties Minute. The preferred method of capital punishment used to be hanging. But hanging could be gruesome. And in the 1890s, New York, followed by other states, switched to the electric chair, which also could be grim indeed. As could be other methods of execution. The firing squad, for example, and the gas chamber, first introduced in Nevada in 1924, but used infrequently.