Long-time readers may find this story vaguely familiar. We first wrote about Michael Godwin in 2023 in “Fated to Die on the Toilet.” You probably do not remember it. According to our statistics, there is an excellent chance you never saw it in the first place. That may have been for the best, since the original article gave an extraordinary story rather ordinary treatment. We have always thought Michael Godwin’s improbable encounter with appellate law, prison plumbing, and electricity deserved a more complete account. With a larger readership and, we hope, somewhat improved writing skills, we are giving it another try.

When prison officials found Michael Anderson Godwin, he was already dead.

He was also naked and sitting on the toilet.

We mention the location of his demise because it is relevant to the story, not because we are inclined toward toilet humor. Admittedly, the existence of an entire collection of toilet-related articles may weaken that denial, but we stand by it nonetheless.

There is simply no getting around the fact that Godwin departed this mortal coil while seated on a steel commode. He had apparently not expected his life to be flushed away when he sat down to attend to his business. Had he known he was reaching his end, he likely would have wiped those plans away and chosen a more dignified location for his final moments.

At the very least, he might have dressed for the occasion.

Instead, the 28-year-old inmate was found naked in his cell at South Carolina’s Central Correctional Institution, dead from an accidental electric shock. The circumstances were so strange that they seemed less like a prison accident and more like the final scene of a morality play written by someone who had yet to master the skill of subtlety.

It was almost as if he was destined to die this way.

Who Was Michael Anderson Godwin?

Contemporary news reports identified him as Michael Anderson Godwin. The published court decision concerning his case used the longer name Michael A. Godwin Sloan. Whatever name appeared on the paperwork, Godwin was no stranger to the South Carolina criminal justice system.

In January 1980, 24-year-old Mary Elizabeth “Molly” Royem was found dead in her West Columbia apartment. She had been struck in the head with an iron. Godwin, who had previously served time for robbery, was arrested and charged with her murder and first-degree criminal sexual assault.

Royem deserves to be remembered as more than the opening act in a story about her killer’s improbable death. She was a young woman whose life was violently taken. The strange way Godwin later died does not undo that crime, restore her life, or turn the case into a comedy.

It does, however, provide the sort of ending that tends to satisfy those who want to see Lady Justice balancing the scales.

Michael Godwin Is Sentenced to the Electric Chair

Godwin was tried for Royem’s murder and the alleged sexual assault. The jury convicted him of both charges, and he was sentenced to death in South Carolina’s electric chair.

At that point, the likely ending of Michael Godwin’s life seemed reasonably clear. The state intended to place him in a chair, connect him to an electrical system, and send enough current through his body to kill him.

Godwin, unsurprisingly, objected to this proposed arrangement.

He appealed his convictions and death sentence to the South Carolina Supreme Court. This was not an unusual step. People sentenced to death tend to become enthusiastic supporters of appellate review, due process, procedural safeguards, and any other legal doctrine capable of postponing the scheduled festivities.

In Godwin’s case, the appeal worked.

How Did Michael Godwin Escape the Electric Chair?

The South Carolina Supreme Court considered Godwin’s case in State v. Sloan. In its December 6, 1982, decision, the court did not declare him innocent. It did not find that someone else had committed the crime. It did not pat Godwin on the shoulder, validate his parking, and send him home with an apology from the state.

Instead, the court concluded that numerous errors during the trial had cumulatively deprived him of a fair proceeding.

One problem involved the prosecutor’s closing argument. The prosecutor pointed out that Godwin’s lawyers had suggested someone else might have committed the murder but had not personally told the jury that Godwin was innocent.

That was improper. A lawyer is not supposed to offer a personal opinion about a client’s guilt or innocence. The prosecutor was effectively inviting the jury to speculate that even Godwin’s own attorneys did not believe him.

The prosecutor also suggested that if the jury acquitted Godwin, Royem’s murder might remain unsolved forever. That may have been emotionally persuasive, but it was not evidence of Godwin’s guilt. A jury’s job is to decide whether the prosecution proved the case against the defendant, not whether an acquittal would produce an unsatisfying finale.

There were additional problems. The prosecution improperly tried to impeach one of its own witnesses, introduced irrelevant testimony suggesting Godwin had previously threatened someone, and commented on his failure to speak with police before his arrest.

The sentencing phase was no tidier.

There were several prosecutorial errors that are likely to interest you only if you are a lawyer. If that describes you, we provided a link to the court’s opinion above, which you may read while taking a break from pulling the wings off butterflies or going door-to-door on Christmas Eve to tell children there is no Santa Claus.

The state supreme court was not impressed. It reversed Godwin’s convictions, vacated his death sentence, and ordered a new trial.

Even an extremely unsympathetic defendant is entitled to a trial conducted according to the rules. The justice system insists on this principle because the alternative is allowing the government to ignore constitutional protections whenever it is particularly confident that the accused is a terrible person. Governments have historically demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with that kind of responsibility.

A Second Trial and a Life Sentence

The reversal did not make Godwin a free man. It merely put the case back where it had been before the defective trial.

Godwin was tried again. In 1983, he was once more convicted of murder, but this time he received a sentence of life imprisonment rather than death in the electric chair.

By the ordinary rules of criminal sentencing, Godwin had escaped electrocution. He was still expected to spend many years behind bars, but the state no longer planned to end his life by passing electricity through his body.

Electricity, it would seem, had lost the appeal.

Television Comes to the Rescue, Sort Of

Godwin spent the next several years at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina. Like many prisoners, he used television to pass the time.

Television is particularly well suited to prison life. It consumes large portions of the day, requires minimal movement, and regularly presents stories in which complicated legal problems are resolved within 42 minutes, plus commercial breaks.

Godwin listened to his television through a pair of earphones. On Sunday, March 5, 1989, the earphones apparently stopped working.

He decided to repair them himself.

This was the first in a series of decisions that would not be included in any future edition of a home electronics manual.

How Did Michael Godwin Electrocute Himself on a Toilet?

Godwin began working on the earphones while they were still connected to the television. For reasons known only to Godwin—and unavailable to anyone hoping to conduct a follow-up interview—he placed the electrical wire in his mouth and bit into it.

Under most circumstances, biting an exposed electrical wire is already a poor strategy. Godwin enhanced the danger by attempting the repair while naked and seated on the steel toilet in his cell.

The electrical current passed through his body, killing him.

Prison officials ruled the death accidental, concluding that Godwin had not deliberately constructed an improvised execution chamber out of a television, some defective earphones, and the prison plumbing.

That assessment seems reasonable. Godwin had spent years using the appellate process to avoid electrocution. It would have been an unusual change in litigation strategy to recreate the experience personally in his bathroom.

Nevertheless, the result was difficult to ignore.

Michael Godwin had been sentenced to die in the electric chair. He successfully appealed that sentence, was retried, and received life imprisonment. Six years later, he sat down on a steel seat, connected himself to an electrical current, and died.

He had accidentally built his own electric chair.

Did Michael Godwin Really Die in an “Electric Toilet”?

The story sounds like one of those internet legends that begins with “This actually happened” and ends without identifying a date, place, source, or participant capable of being located outside Facebook.

In this case, however, the essential facts are documented.

The Los Angeles Times, relying on a United Press International report published on March 8, 1989, described Godwin as a convicted murderer who had avoided the electric chair and then accidentally electrocuted himself while sitting on a steel toilet. The report identified him by name, gave his age as 28, named the Central Correctional Institution, and explained that he had bitten into the wire while attempting to repair earphones connected to his television.

The newspaper even used the headline “Convicted Killer Dies in His Own Electric Chair,” which demonstrates that journalists of 1989 were no more capable of resisting the obvious phrase than the rest of us.

The toilet itself was not wired as an execution device. It did not come equipped with electrodes, a control switch, or a warning label advising inmates to consult a licensed electrician before use. Calling it an “electric toilet” is shorthand for the combination of the live wire, Godwin’s body, and the metal commode.

It was a toilet. It became electrical. The distinction was probably of limited comfort to Godwin.

Poetic Justice or an Extraordinary Coincidence?

It is tempting to describe Michael Godwin’s death as poetic justice. After all, he was convicted of a murder in which the victim had been struck with an iron. He was sentenced to death by electrocution. He escaped that sentence through a successful appeal. Then, years later, he accidentally electrocuted himself while sitting on a steel toilet.

The electrical theme is so persistent that it feels as though fate hired the scriptwriter.

Still, there is a difference between irony and justice. Justice concerned the lawful prosecution and punishment of Royem’s killer. Godwin’s first trial contained serious errors, and the South Carolina Supreme Court was correct to require a fair retrial. Constitutional protections do not depend on whether the defendant is likable, respectable, or someone we would invite to handle electrical repairs.

Godwin was retried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment. That was the legal conclusion of the case.

What happened six years later belongs to a different department—somewhere between freak accident, poor judgment, and cosmic irony.

Why the Strange Death of Michael Godwin Endures

There is no shortage of unusual deaths in history, and we have a whole category of articles devoted to the subject. People have been killed by falling tortoises, exploding whales, runaway beer, defective parachutes, and their own unusually ambitious facial hair. Humanity has spent thousands of years discovering that nearly every object can become dangerous if combined with sufficient confidence and unfortunate timing.

Godwin’s story remains especially memorable because it contains nearly everything required for a durable historical oddity: a violent crime, a death sentence, an appellate reversal, an improbable accident, and a final location that makes dignified narration all but impossible.

It also sounds too perfectly arranged to be true. A man escapes the electric chair and later electrocutes himself while sitting on a steel toilet. Any responsible reader should be skeptical. That skepticism is precisely why the contemporary news report and the published appellate decision matter.

The legal details make the story more complicated than the familiar one-paragraph version. Godwin did not merely persuade a judge to reduce his punishment. His convictions and death sentence were reversed because of numerous errors, and he was then convicted again after a new trial.

That fuller history does nothing to diminish the extraordinary ending. It merely establishes that fate waited until the judicial process was finished before submitting its own opinion.

Michael Godwin Escaped the Electric Chair—Temporarily

Godwin was not the only person to have an unusually complicated relationship with the electric chair. In 1946, Louisiana attempted to execute Willie Francis, only to have the equipment malfunction and leave him alive—a temporary reprieve that led to one of the strangest execution cases in American legal history. Read “Willie Francis: The Teenager Who Was Executed Twice” for that saga.

Michael Anderson Godwin successfully avoided execution in South Carolina’s electric chair. His appeal vacated his original convictions and death sentence, and his second trial resulted in a murder conviction and life imprisonment.

By every ordinary legal measure, electrocution was no longer part of his future.

Ordinary legal measures, however, had not accounted for a broken pair of earphones, an exposed wire, a steel toilet, and one catastrophically poor repair technique.

Godwin escaped the electric chair. Six years later, while sitting in his prison cell, he accidentally made one of his own.

In other words, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

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