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Suicide by hanging.

Hanging is a form of execution or a method for suicide. It has been used throughout history as a form of capital punishment (and is still in use in some Middle Eastern countries as well as some Asian countries). There are four methods of hanging:

  • the long drop
  • the short drop
  • the standard drop
  • suspension hanging

A long-drop hanging may break the neck (cervical fracture) causing traumatic spinal cord injury and consequent asphyxia and brain hypoxia.

A long-drop, short-drop, standard-drop or suspension hanging may do one or more of the following:

In the United Kingdom the short-drop method was used until the 19th century, when the long drop was introduced. The short drop could be a protracted affair and was primarily for the entertainment of the watching public, the struggling of the victim giving rise to such terms as "the hangman's hornpipe".

History

Hanging has been used as punishment throughout history; it is known to have been invented and used by the Persian Empire. The typical sentence involving hanging is that the condemned person "be hanged by the neck until dead". A more elaborate sentence, once used for particularly heinous crimes such as high treason in England, was for the person to be hanged, drawn and quartered – here the victim was saved from asphyxiation in order to endure the further ordeals.

Hanging has historically been the method of execution used for common criminals; in feudal England, for example, peasants were usually hanged for crimes, while the nobility were usually beheaded. Since as a result hanging has become associated with dishonorable execution, the courts in the post-World War II which presided over trials for war crimes in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, such as the Nuremberg Trials mandated its use for war criminals rather than execution by firing squad.

As a form of judicial execution in England, hanging is thought to date from the Saxon period, approximately around 400. Records of the names of British hangmen begin with Thomas de Warblynton in the 1360s; complete records extend from the 1500s to the last hangmen, Robert Leslie Stewart and Harry Allen, who conducted the last British executions in 1964.

Early methods of hanging simply involved a hangman's noose on a rope placed around the victim's neck, with the loose end thrown over or tied to a tree branch; the hangman then drew up the criminal, who was slowly strangled. An early refinement had the victim climb a ladder or stand in a cart that the hangman then removed. As the number of executions increased, purpose-built gallows, which usually consisted of two posts joined by a crossbeam, replaced trees. Soon virtually every major town and city in Britain had its own gallows.

Although hangmen had introduced the "drop" by the late 1700s, it was initially only a substitute for the ladder or the cart. The first well-known practitioner of "the drop" was William Calcraft. His successor however, William Marwood, who was often quoted as saying "Calcraft hanged them, I execute them", introduced the "long drop". Marwood realised that each person required a different drop, based on the prisoner's weight, which would dislocate the cervical vertebrae resulting in "instantaneous" death.

detail from a painting by Pisanello, 1436-1438

A process of sometimes grisly experimentation led to the discovery that an energy of 1260 foot pounds (1710 joules) would have the desired effect, so one could calculate the required drop by dividing 1260 by the weight of the victim: a person weighing 112 pounds (50.8 kg) required a drop of 11'4" (3.43 m). Over time, Marwood refined this basic formula to take account of the prisoner's age, stature, and physical condition, especially after some early mistakes when too great a drop resulted in decapitation. Marwood also experimented with the positioning of the knot, and discovered that placing it under the left ear or under the angle of the left jaw would jerk the head backwards at the end of the drop and instantly sever the spinal cord and dislocate the cervical vertebrae. Prison governors and staff who were required, following the abolition of public executions in 1868, to witness executions at close quarters, welcomed the development of swift and "clean" methods of hanging.

As time went by, hanging became more of a science than an art. By the mid-20th century the average time between taking a victim from the cell and death was around fifteen seconds – although on May 8, 1951 Albert Pierrepoint conducted the fastest hanging on record when James Inglis, whom a court had only three weeks earlier convicted and sentenced for the murder of a prostitute, fell through the trap only seven seconds after leaving his cell.

Extra-legal primitive forms of hanging persisted well into the 20th century in the United States in the form of lynchings, where torture or mutilation of the corpse often accompanied the hanging.

Mechanism of action

The cause of death in hanging depends on the conditions related to the event. When the body is released from a relatively high position, death is usually caused by severing the spinal cord between C1 and C2, which is effectively decapitation. This frequently occurs in judicial hangings. In the rest of instances spinal cord damage may have a role but the main reason is obstruction of venous drainage of the brain via occlusion of the internal jugular veins, which leads to cerebral oedema and then cerebral ischemia. Other processes that have being linked to contribute are, vagal collapse, via mechanical stimulation of the carotid sinus and compromise of the cerebral blood flow by obstruction of the carotid arteries, even though their obstruction requires far more force than the obstruction of jugular veins, since they are seated deeper and they contain blood in much higher pressure compared to the jugular veins. Contrary to the common notion, airway compromise is not regarded a leading cause of death in hanging. Forensic experts can tell if hanging is suicide or homicide, as each leaves a distinctive ligature mark. One of the hints they use is the hyoid bone, that, if broken, often means the person has been murdered, by manual choking. Also, there have been cases of autoerotic asphyxiation leading to death; recently, children have accidentally died playing the choking game.

Hanging by country

Britain

Main article: Capital punishment in the United Kingdom

Until 1808 the law in Britain offered the death penalty for some 200 offenses, including:

A variety of loopholes in British criminal law, together with judicial leniency, tempered the law's tendency to prescribe hanging for what many would today consider minor offences. First-time offenders could escape a capital sentence for some crimes through the benefit of clergy, and of those criminals actually sentenced to death, many were later pardoned. Only about half the death sentences pronounced at common law in the 18th century were carried out, and by the beginning of the 19th century, growing doubt over the appropriateness of capital punishment led to nearly 90% of British capital sentences being commuted to lesser punishments.

Between 1832 and 1834 Parliament abolished the death penalty for:

In 1861, Parliament reduced the number of capital crimes to four:

Britain ended public hangings in 1868 and formally abolished the hanging, beheading and quartering of traitors in 1870.

In 1965 Parliament passed the 'Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act' abolishing capital punishment for murder. And with the introduction of the Human Rights Act in 1998, the death penalty was officially abolished for all crimes in both civilian and military cases.

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, the last persons to be sentenced to death by hanging were Andrey Vlasov and 11 other officers of his army on August 1, 1946.

Iran

One of the hanging execution procedures currently used in Iran does not use a drop, but involves using an automotive telescoping crane to hoist the condemned aloft. This method may have been adapted from yardarm hangings carried out by the Royal Navy.

A recent hanging carried out by this method in Iran was that of a 16 year old girl, Ateqeh Rajabi, who was hanged in August 2004 for sexual misdemeanours. The conduct of her case and her actual execution were very controversial internationally.

The United States

Main article: ]

In the United States, other forms of capital punishment, such as the electric chair and more recently lethal injection, have largely replaced hanging.

At present, only Washington and New Hampshire still retain hanging as an option. Laws changed in 1996 that penalties of death must be executed by injection unless the convict chooses hanging, but none has taken place ever since. In New Hampshire if it found "... to be impractical to carry out the punishment of death ..." by lethal injection, then the condemned will be hanged. In Washington, the default method is lethal injection, though the condemned can choose hanging.

Serial killer and child molester Westley Allan Dodd chose it over injection in 1992. (See the book Driven to Kill.) Charles Campbell was another person hanged in the same State on 27 May 1994. The last person hanged in the United States was Billy Bailey, on January 25 1996 in Delaware, and later the same state abolished this practice.

Singapore

Main article: Capital punishment in Singapore

Singapore currently employs mandatory execution as punishment for various crimes, such as for example, drug trafficking over certain quantities. The only execution method currently employed is via hanging using the long-drop method. There is little evidence for a change in policy such as the adoption of lethal injection, with the Singapore Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng informing the Parliament of Singapore that the government "had previously studied the different methods of execution and found no reason to change from the current method used, that is, by hanging".

Recent hangings

File:Irangay teens.jpg
Iranian minority Arab youths Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni on the scaffold. (Mashhad, July 19, 2005). .

Hanging is commonly the method of executing penalties of death in Commonwealth countries that still have it, such as in the cases of Malaysia and Singapore.

A recent case of capital punishment by hanging is that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was convicted of the 1990 murder and rape of a 14 year old girl in Kolkata(Calcutta) in India. Although the Supreme Court of India has suggested that capital punishment be given in the rarest of rare cases, Chatterjee was executed on August 14 2004 in the first execution in West Bengal for eleven years.

On February 27 2004 the mastermind of the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Shoko Asahara, was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Hanging is the common method of execution in capital punishment cases in Japan, although the punishment is rarely executed.

On July 19 2005, two Iranian boys, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, were publicly hanged at Edalat (Justice) Square in Mashhad, northeast Iran, on charges of homosexuality and rape. The punishment has been met with international outrage. At the ages of 15 and 17, respectively, they were discovered having sexual relations. They were imprisoned for fourteen months and subjected to 228 lashes each, then executed. According to the ISNA report as translated by OutRage "They admitted having gay sex but claimed in their defense that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death." Subsequent to their execution the government broadcast the allegation that they had raped a 13-year-old boy, a story rejected by MAHA, the voice of the Iranian gay community.

In Singapore, a 25-year old Australian, Nguyen Tuong Van, was hanged on December 2, 2005 after being convicted of drug trafficking in 2002. Numerous efforts from both the Australian government, numerous QCs (Queens Counsels) and countless petitions from organisations such as Amnesty International failed.

On March 9 2006, an official of Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council has confirmed that Iraqi authorities executed 13 insurgents by hanging, the first official executions of insurgents carried out in the country since the restoration of the death penalty in 2004.

In USA Mitchell Rupe a former death row inmate once found too heavy to hang, died at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla following a long illness. He was 51. Juries twice sentenced him to death, but higher courts overturned the sentences.

In 1994, a federal judge upheld his conviction but agreed with Rupe's contention that at 400 pounds, he was too heavy to hang because of the risk of decapitation. Rupe argued that would be cruel and unusual punishment.

At the time, Washington's only manner of execution was hanging. The main method now is lethal injection.

Grammar

The term "hanging" is the focus of a famous bit of grammatical trivia. Traditionally, the past tense and past participle of the verb "to hang" are "hung" when referring to the abstract idea of hanging things, but "hanged" when referring to an execution or death by hanging.

A useful way of remembering this is the old school saying, "Meat is hung, men are hanged.'

The distinction is not always followed; but in cases where it is not, such as when, in the song "Why Can't the English?" from the musical My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins sings

By rights she should be taken out and hung
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

the choice often appears to have been made to suit the rhyme and meter. (Professor Higgins is a linguist, so there may also be an element of intentional irony in his phrasing.)

Hanging to Music. (A Minstrel condemned to the Gallows obtained permission that one of his companions should accompany him to his execution, and play his favourite instrument on the ladder of the Gallows.) – Facsimile of a Woodcut in Michault's "Doctrinal du Temps Présent": small folio, goth., Bruges, about 1490.

Folklore

A common legend holds that if the rope used to hang a person breaks three times, it is a sign of divine intervention and the condemned should be released.

See also

External links

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