Hanging
Hanging is killing a person by suspending them from the neck with a noose or ligature. Hanging has been a common method of capital punishment since the Middle Ages, and is the primary execution method in numerous countries and regions. The first known account of execution by hanging is in Homer's Odyssey. Hanging is also a method of suicide.
The past and past participle of hang in this sense is hanged, not hung.
Methods of judicial hanging
There are numerous methods of hanging in execution which instigate death either by cervical fracture or by strangulation.
Short drop
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The short drop is a method of hanging in which the condemned prisoner stands on a raised support such as a stool, ladder, cart, or other vehicle, with the noose around the neck. The support is then moved away, leaving the person dangling from the rope.[1][2]
Suspended by the neck, the weight of the body tightens the noose around the neck, effecting strangulation and death. This typically takes 10–20 minutes.[3]
Before 1850, the short drop was the standard method of hanging, and it is still common in suicides and extrajudicial hangings (such as lynchings and summary executions) which do not benefit from the specialised equipment and drop-length calculation tables used in the newer methods.
Pole method
A short-drop variant is the Austro-Hungarian "pole" method, called Würgegalgen (literally: strangling gallows), in which the following steps take place:
- The condemned is made to stand before a specialized vertical pole or pillar, approximately Template:Convert in height.
- A rope is attached around the condemned's feet and routed through a pulley at the base of the pole.
- The condemned is hoisted to the top of the pole by means of a sling running across the chest and under the armpits.
- A narrow-diameter noose is looped around the prisoner's neck, then secured to a hook mounted at the top of the pole.
- The chest sling is released, and the prisoner is rapidly jerked downward by the assistant executioners via the foot rope.
- The executioner stands on a stepped platform approximately Template:Convert high beside the condemned. The executioner would place the heel of his hand beneath the prisoner's jaw to increase the force on the neck vertebrae at the end of the drop, then manually dislocate the condemned's neck by forcing the head to one side while the neck vertebrae were under traction.
This method was later also adopted by the successor states, most notably by Czechoslovakia, where the "pole" method was used as the single type of execution from 1918 until the abolition of capital punishment in 1990. Nazi war criminal Karl Hermann Frank, executed in 1946 in Prague, was among approximately 1,000 condemned people executed in this manner in Czechoslovakia.[4]
Standard drop
The standard drop involves a drop of between Template:Convert and came into use from 1866, when the scientific details were published by Irish doctor Samuel Haughton. Its use rapidly spread to English-speaking countries and those with judicial systems of English origin.
It was considered a humane improvement on the short drop because it was intended to be enough to break the person's neck, causing immediate unconsciousness and rapid brain death.[5][6]
This method was used to execute condemned Nazis under United States jurisdiction after the Nuremberg Trials, including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ernst Kaltenbrunner.[7]Template:Nonspecific In the execution of Ribbentrop, historian Giles MacDonogh records that: "The hangman botched the execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for 20 minutes before he expired."[8] A Life magazine report on the execution merely says: "The trap fell open and with a sound midway between a rumble and a crash, Ribbentrop disappeared. The rope quivered for a time, then stood tautly straight."[9]
Long drop
The long-drop process, also known as the measured drop, was introduced to Britain in 1872 by William Marwood as a scientific advance on the standard drop. Instead of everyone falling the same standard distance, the person's height and weight[10] were used to determine how much slack would be provided in the rope so that the distance dropped would be enough to ensure that the neck was broken, but not so much that the person was decapitated. Careful placement of the eye or knot of the noose (so that the head was jerked back as the rope tightened) contributed to breaking the neck.
Prior to 1892, the drop was between four and ten feet (about one to three metres), depending on the weight of the body, and was calculated to deliver an energy of Template:Convert, which fractured the neck at either the 2nd and 3rd or 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae. This force resulted in some decapitations, such as the infamous case of Black Jack Ketchum in New Mexico Territory in 1901, owing to a significant weight gain while in custody not having been factored into the drop calculations. Between 1892 and 1913, the length of the drop was shortened to avoid decapitation. After 1913, other factors were also taken into account, and the energy delivered was reduced to about Template:Convert.
| weight of prisoner[11] | 1892 drop(ft & inches) | Ft.lbs energy developed | 1913 drop(feet & inches) | Ft.lbs energy developed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 105 and under | 8'0" | 840 | - | - |
| 110 | 7'10" | 862 | - | - |
| 115 | 7'3" | 834 | 8'6" | 1003 |
| 120 | 7'0" | 840 | 8'4" | 1000 |
| 125 | 6'9" | 844 | 8'0" | 1000 |
| 130 | 6'5" | 834 | 7'8" | 996 |
| 135 | 6'2" | 833 | 7'5" | 1001 |
| 140 | 6'0" | 840 | 7'2" | 1003 |
| 145 | 5'9" | 834 | 6'11" | 1003 |
| 150 | 5'7" | 838 | 6'8" | 999 |
| 155 | 5'5" | 840 | 6'5" | 995 |
| 160 | 5'3" | 853 | 6'3" | 1000 |
| 165 | 5'1" | 839 | 6'1" | 1004 |
| 170 | 4'11" | 836 | 5'10" | 992 |
| 175 | 4'9" | 831 | 5'8" | 991 |
| 180 | 4'8" | 839 | 5'7" | 1005 |
| 185 | 4'7" | 848 | 5'5" | 1002 |
| 190 | 4'5" | 839 | 5'3" | 993 |
| 195 | 4'4" | 844 | 5'2" | 1008 |
| 200 and over | 4'2" | 833 | 5'0" | 1008 |
The decapitation of Eva Dugan during a botched hanging in 1930 led the state of Arizona to switch to the gas chamber as its primary execution method, on the grounds that it was believed more humane.[12] One of the more recent decapitations as a result of the long drop occurred when Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was hanged in Iraq in 2007.[13] Accidental decapitation also occurred during the 1962 hanging of Arthur Lucas, one of the last two individuals to be put to death in Canada.<ref>{{citation
- ↑ Hughes, Robert (11 January 2012). The Fatal Shore: The epic of Australia's founding. Knopf Doubleday, 33ff. ISBN 978-0-307-81560-6. “Before the invention of the hinged trapdoor through which the victim was dropped, he or she was 'turned off' or 'twisted' by the hangman who pulled the ladder away.”
- ↑ Potter, John Deane (1965). The Art of Hanging. A. S. Barnes, 23. ISBN 9780498073878. “... condemned persons still mounted a ladder which was turned round, leaving them dangling. This led to the phrase 'turned off'—they were literally turned off the ladder.”
- ↑ (2007) Agonal Sequences in a Filmed Suicidal Hanging: Analysis of Respiratory and Movement Responses to Asphyxia by Hanging 52, 957–959. Digital object identifier:10.1111/j.1556-4029.2007.00459.x.
- ↑ 1946: Karl Hermann Frank, http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/05/22/1946-karl-hermann-frank/ article status: live
- ↑ How Does Death by Hanging Work?, https://health.howstuffworks.com/diseases-conditions/death-dying/death-by-hanging.htm article status: live
- ↑ (2009) Cause of death in judicial hanging: a review and case study 49, 18–26. Digital object identifier:10.1258/rsmmsl.49.1.18.
- ↑ Report by Kingsbury Smith, International News Service, 16 October 1946.
- ↑ MacDonogh G., After the Reich John Murray, London (2008) p. 450.
- ↑ "The Gallows Chamber". Life, 28 October 1946. https://web.archive.org/web/20160512222220/https://books.google.com/books?id=iU0EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA42 Date: 12 May 2016 .
- ↑ History of British judicial hanging, http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/hanging1.html article status: live
- ↑ Hanged by the neck until dead. The process of judicial hanging, https://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/hanging2.html#causes
- ↑ "Gruesome death in gas chamber pushes Arizona towards injections". The New York Times, 25 April 1992. https://web.archive.org/web/20110103182212/http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE5D7113BF936A15757C0A964958260 Date: 3 January 2011 . Retrieved 7 January 2008.
- ↑ Template:Citation