The practice began among the Moguls in the Indian subcontinent in the early sixteenth century. When the British Raj was in control of India they needed a method of execution for natives guilty of mutiny or desertion from the army, and just like the New York Electrical Death Commission, they set up a committee to look at the alternatives. The normal method of execution at the time was flogging the prisoner to death. This was a slow and painful death, dragged out over several minutes. It was traumatic on both the victim and the executioner. The committee chose blowing from a cannon as a more humane alternative.
It also had the advantage of being a huge deterrent. The sight of a prisoner being literally blown apart would inspire fear in other potential mutineers and keep the natives in line.
The cannon was normally loaded with a blank charge—just powder and wadding. But still, things could go wrong. At a mass execution in Firozpur, Punjab, India, in 1857 someone accidentally loaded grapeshot into the cannons instead of the blank charge. Several of the spectators were hit with the grapeshot resulting in one death and two serious injuries. The two who were injured had to have limbs amputated as a result of the botched execution.
Another danger was flying body parts. Soldiers who did not get clear of the cannon in time risked injuries from whizzing pieces of flesh and bone, and there is one instance, again in Firozpur in 1862, of a soldier being concussed by a falling arm.
Most methods of execution fail on occasion, and that is true of blowing from a cannon. This account comes from the Bombay Gazette:
After the explosion, the grouping of the men’s remains in front of each gun was various and frightful. One man’s head was perched upon his back, and he was staring round as if looking for his legs and arms. All you see at the time was a cloud like a dust storm composed of shreds of clothing, burning muscle, and frizzing fat with lumps of coagulated blood. Here and there a stomach or a liver came falling down in a stinking shower. One wretched fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied to the guns just before the explosion, and his arm was nearly set on fire. While hanging in his agony under the gun, a sergeant applied a pistol to his head. This was the most horrible sight of all. I have seen death in all its forms, but never anything to equal this man’s end.
Then there were the birds of prey which circled overhead, swooping down to catch the flying flesh of the condemned—and the dogs that swarmed the field after every execution. Gruesome. Blowing from a cannon never spread beyond Asia, aside from a few instances in Portuguese colonies in Mozambique and Brazil. It was used up until 1930 in Afghanistan.
But it was too cruel for American sensibilities, and was never seriously considered by the commission.
METHOD THREE: BURNING
One of the most ancient and widespread methods of carrying out the death penalty is by burning. This was recorded from ancient times right up to the last century, and was used in Europe, Africa, Asia, and America. It even has biblical backing. It certainly fulfills the function of being a deterrent—no one would choose it as a method of dying. Spectators were horrified—and strangely fascinated—by the sight of victims being immolated in large public squares throughout Europe.
The most common method was that victims would be tied to a stake and a large fire built around them. Once the fire was ignited, they would burn. If the fire was large, death normally came by way of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning long before the flames began to consume the body. This meant that while it looked barbaric, it was actually quite a gentle death. Aside, that is, from the panic that it would cause its victims.
But if the fire was small, the victim often died in agony of heatstroke, shock, or simply from their internal organs cooking.
Throughout medieval Europe this was a very common method of execution, often reserved for treason, witchcraft, and sexual and religious crimes. Estimates vary, but up to three hundred thousand women may have been put to the torch for the imaginary crime of witchcraft before the Enlightenment ended the practice. It was generally women that went to the stake but sometimes men suffered that fate. The religious nature of the execution was backed up by biblical references aplenty. It was a common practice in the Middle East in biblical times.
In Genesis 38, there is an account of Judah, the founder of one of the Tribes of Israel, condemning his widowed daughter-in-law to death because she became pregnant outside of marriage. But the sentence was set aside when he realized that he was the one who got her in that interesting condition.
Through Roman times and on into the Christian era, burning continued to be carried out. It became the favored method for certain classes of crime. For instance, in the Byzantine Empire burning replaced an older punishment for those convicted of killing a member of their family. The older method involved stuffing the convict in a sack with a rooster, a viper, a dog, and a monkey, then throwing the sack into the sea. A truly bizarre method that never caught on outside of that small corner of the world.
By the Middle Ages, burning was the execution method of choice for heretics and others who offended against the power of the Church. By the thirteenth century it was laid down in law as the principal execution method throughout the sphere of influence of the Roman church. There are many recorded instances of whole Jewish communities being burned at large public spectacles for the next few hundred years. In one day in the winter of 1349, two thousand Jews were burned on a large scaffold at the cemetery in Strasbourg—blamed for bringing the Black Death plague to Europe.
Equally heinous were the actions of the Inquisition, a religious tribunal which policed matters of faith in Spain and Portugal in particular, but also elsewhere in Europe. Established in 1478 in Spain to preserve Catholic orthodoxy, the Inquisition clamped down on heresy, Judaism, and witchcraft. In the first twelve years, two thousand victims burned. In its three hundred-year history, up to fifty thousand others may have met the same fate. A similar number were burned at the stake as witches throughout this period.
Burning also became the punishment of choice for sexual deviance, including homosexuality. But by the nineteenth century, burning had died out as a punishment. The last two instances of it occurred in Germany, in 1804 and 1813. Johannes Thomas was convicted of arson and sentenced to die on July 13, 1804. But he was placed several feet above the pyre—in a wooden chamber attached to a stake. Sulfuric smoke was piped into the chamber, suffocating him before the flames engulfed him. Twenty thousand people watched the execution. In 1813, lovers and arsonists Johann Horst and Friederike Delitz were sentenced to burn. But both were secretly strangled to death by the executioner as he secured them to the stakes, saving them a painful death.
Burning was a popular, though never legally sanctioned, method of execution in North America for centuries. Native Americans used it as a form of execution against members of rival tribes or against white settlers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their method was slow and painful; the victim was roasted over a fire in a prolonged torture, unlike the quicker “burning at the stake” of the Europeans.
White settlers also occasionally used burning as an execution method. In Massachusetts there are two known cases. In 1681, a slave was burned for trying to kill her master by burning his house down, and in 1755, another slave was burned for killing his master, at Cambridge. In New York there were several cases, generally of slaves. Following the Slave Revolt of 1712, twenty rebels were burned to death, and one was slowly roasted, to act as a deterrent against further revolts. The roasting took ten agonizing hours. The slave was put on a lattice of rods and a smoldering fire lit beneath him—the fire kept hot enough to ensure that his screams rang out for hours.
Thirty years later, following another revolt, thirteen more slaves were put to the torch.
Following the end of slavery, burning continued to be a popular method of carrying out illegal executions on members of the black community, particularly in the southern states. Those lynchings, which continued to the 1960s, are one of the most shameful aspects of American h
istory.
Variants on burning included pouring molten metal down the convict’s throat, boiling the victim alive, and even frying them in oil. These painful methods never made an appearance in America. Though the United States had a history of burning black citizens, it was never used against whites and was not considered seriously by the commission. Although it could be managed to make death painless, and although it left no possibility of resuscitation and no body to martyr, burning was a horrific spectacle that the new nation did not want to consider.
METHOD FOUR: GARROTE
At its simplest, a garrote is a length of rope, wire, or similar ligature which is wrapped around the victim’s neck and tightened, choking or strangling him or her to death. It is a common tool of the assassin and is also used by soldiers who want a quick and silent kill on clandestine missions. The garrote was also, for centuries, the favored method of execution in Spain and its colonies.
Done correctly, it mimics the effect of a short-drop hanging. The victim dies of strangulation. This has two immediate effects—the carotid artery in the brain is compressed, resulting in loss of consciousness and eventual death; and the windpipe is constricted, cutting off oxygen to the lungs. This causes death within minutes at the most. Unlike short-drop hanging, the pressure is applied from the rear, rather than from a rope above the prisoner’s head. This means that far more pressure is applied directly on the neck, resulting in a faster death. As any wrestler or mixed martial artist will attest, a correctly applied choke hold results in unconsciousness in seconds, making a garrote a very efficient tool for executions.
The method came from the Moors and Arabs and was perfected in Spain several hundred years ago. It is named from “garrote,” a small stick or club. Traditionally a garrote had two short sticks with the ligature between them. The executioner used the sticks for grip and to tighten the pressure. But the initial garrote executions involved prisoners being beaten to death with the short sticks; strangulation only gradually crept in. Eventually garroting became a precise science.
By the eighteenth century, the garrote consisted of a chair with a pole behind it. The prisoner sat in the chair and a chain or rope was wrapped around his neck strapping him to the pole. Then a screw was turned which rapidly tightened the noose, resulting in quick loss of consciousness. A further refinement was a bolt or spike that came out of the pole and pressed into the back of the neck as the screw tightened. This bolt would snap the spinal column, resulting in instant death from a broken neck. This way the garrote was slightly slower than a perfect hanging (though much quicker than a botched one), but absolutely guaranteed to end the life of the prisoner without undue suffering. Of man’s many attempts to find a humane execution method, it is one of the methods that came closest.
As the electric chair is peculiarly American, the garrote was a Spanish specialty, being used in that country and its empire for centuries. It was the method of choice in the Philippines until the United States captured that colony in 1898. The new US authorities maintained the garrote for a few years until it was replaced, briefly, with the electric chair. United States military authorities also used the garrote in Puerto Rico. In a report to Congress, the American military governor Brigadier General George Davis said, “Execution by the garrote is far less inhumane and revolting than execution by hanging.”
Despite this endorsement from a man who had overseen both sorts of execution, the garrote was soon replaced with the gallows. The last public garroting in Spain happened in Barcelona in May 1897. Like most countries in the developed world, executions moved inside to the confines of the prison. The last garroting occurred in March 1974. George Michael Welzel and Salvador Puig Antich were anarchists. During a shoot-out a young police officer was killed and both men were condemned to die. It was an unpopular decision by the Franco-led fascist government and the death penalty was abolished a few years later.
The last country to abandon the garrote was the tiny kingdom of Andorra, in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. They took the method off the books in 1990. But the removal was largely symbolic; there had been no garroting in the principality since the twelfth century.
Despite being considered one of the most humane and practical methods of execution, garroting was never a serious contender to replace hanging in New York. Perhaps it was a bit too hands-on for late-nineteenth century sensibilities. The commission noted its “celerity and certainty,” but argued that the fact that it had not spread beyond Spain showed that it might not be the method to adopt.
METHOD FIVE: HANGING
There is a broad spectrum in executions from the barbaric, such as breaking on a wheel or stoning—to the swift and painless, such as a bullet to the back of the head, the guillotine, or the garrote. Hanging falls more on the humane side but retains an element of the barbaric. It is a gruesome sight to see the convict drop through the trap and dangle in the air, legs twitching. Normally, hanging results in a swift death, but it can go wrong. Too long a drop, and the head snaps off as the body plunges to the ground. Too short, and the convict dies a painful death from strangulation, taking up to ten minutes to die.
Worldwide, hanging is one of the most popular methods of execution. In the English-speaking world, it was almost universal for a while. It has a long history. Initially, hanging was a lot more brutal than it is today. A noose was placed around the convict’s neck and thrown over a beam of some sort—perhaps a gallows or a branch of a tree. The prisoner was hoisted up and slowly strangled by the weight of his own body against the noose.
Because of the way the pressure was applied, death could be prolonged. In a garrote the pressure is applied directly from the back of the neck, whereas in a hanging the pressure is upwards, reducing its efficiency. That is why a garrote results in speedy loss of consciousness, whereas a hanging can leave the prisoner fully aware of all that his body is suffering. Because of this, the prisoner often twitches and kicks his legs for several minutes as he dies. This death dance became known as the Tyburn Jig. Tyburn was a place of public execution in London, England, for centuries. At Tyburn, there was a three-sided gallows which could hang up to twenty people at a time.
In 1866 an Irish doctor, Samuel Haughton, worked out a new way of hanging. If the noose was placed to the side of the head and the prisoner had a four to six foot drop from the gallows, the noose would snap the prisoner’s neck. This would cause immediate paralysis and unconsciousness, making death come swifter and without pain. Within months, this new method was in use throughout the English-speaking world, where it was considered a vast improvement over the previous slow strangulation. In 1872 William Marwood introduced a refinement, calculating the length of the drop according to the height and weight of the prisoner. This refinement became the standard for executions by hanging.
Of course, a swift and painless death was not always the aim of an executioner. Other variants of hanging were created which prolonged the suffering of the victim. One of the worst was when victims were hung by the ribs. A small incision was made with a knife between two ribs and an iron hook was inserted. The prisoner was suspended by the hook. Normally they would survive for three days or more before succumbing to dehydration. It was used occasionally in Eastern Europe and by the Dutch in Suriname.
Another variant was to hang a convict by the feet. This was used in medieval Europe, often against Jews. The prisoner would take a week or more to die. To add to the public spectacle, the person was often hung between two rabid dogs who would bite and harry the condemned man.
Hanging had a long history in America, being the method of execution used by the early colonists. The largest mass execution in US history was the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux Indians in Minnesota in 1862. Hanging remained in use long after the introduction of the electric chair. In 1979, Billy Bailey shot and killed two elderly people in Delaware. On January 25, 1996, after a last meal of well-done steak and baked potato, he stepped through the trap and into history as the last man to be hanged in the United S
tates.
The New York Commission (which introduced the electric chair) was set up to replace hanging as an execution method. It took ninety years to completely succeed. Their main objection to hanging was that it could go badly wrong. It also created a very grisly public spectacle, especially if the condemned was a woman or someone else who would excite public sympathy. This was a real concern. A few decades after the commission had done its work, there was an armed rebellion in Ireland against British rule. That happened in 1916 in the middle of World War I, and the rebels had virtually no public support. The leaders were executed by firing squad. But one of the leaders, James Connolly, had been injured in the fighting and was placed in a wheelchair for his execution. The reports of a badly injured man being executed in a wheelchair was enough to turn the tide of public opinion against the British authorities and cause the uprising to escalate into an all-out war.
A second concern was the possibility of resuscitation. If a person was cut down too early from a gallows, and the neck had not broken, there was a real possibility he would later wake up. This had happened on a number of occasions, both in the United States and abroad.
METHOD SIX: POISONING
Poisoning has ended up the execution method of choice throughout most of the United States, having replaced the electric chair many decades ago. Lethal injection and the gas chamber are two modern and high-tech systems of delivering poison, nothing more.
Poisoning has a long and sordid history but was used more often as a secret method of murder or assassination rather than as the ultimate sanction of the law. There are so many poisons; the choice is bewildering. There are poisons that kill in seconds (cyanide), that kill over weeks or months (arsenic), or that kill without leaving a trace (curare). People can choose how much pain they wanted their victim to suffer—an easy end or a hard one. But there is something sneaky about the poisoner, and lawmakers have historically been reluctant to make something so underhand a method of execution.
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