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Methods of capital punishment
Methods of execution used to carry out capital punishment have varied over time, and include:
- Asphyxiation (or strangulation)
- Boiling to death
- Python Bites
- Brazen bull
- Burning, especially for religious heretics and witches on the stake
- Breaking wheel
- Burial (alive, also known as the pit)
- Crucifixion
- Crushing by a weight, abruptly or as a slow ordeal - see also Various animal-related methods below.
- Decapitation, or beheading (as by sword, axe or guillotine)
- Disembowelment
- Dismemberment
- Drawing and quartering
- Drowning
- Electrocution (also electric chair)
- Explosives
- Exposure in animal skin
- Flaying
- Garrote
- Gassing
- Guillotine
- Hanging
- Impalement
- Lethal injection
- Poisoning
- Pendulum Blade
- Sawing
- Scaphism and other similar methods
- Shooting can be performed either
- by Firing squad
- by a single shooter (such as the neck shot, often performed on a kneeling prisoner, as in the PR China)
- (especially collectively) by cannon or machine gun
- Slow slicing
- Stabbing
- Starvation and Dehydration (sometimes as immurement)
- Stoning
- By being thrown from a height. Rome executed murderers and traitors by flinging them from the Tarpeian Rock. Defenestration, the act of throwing someone from a window, has been used more by rebels and angry mobs than by official executions. During the Argentinean Dirty War, some victims were even pushed out of planes and into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean to drown (this form of disappearance was termed vuelos de la muerte, "death flights"). However, death flights are far from being forms of capital punishment, since the victims were not judged, but simply illegally executed. Death flights were also used during the Algerian War (1954-62) by Marcel Bigeard's paratroopers.
- Various animal-related methods
- Tearing apart by horses, e.g. Ancient China (using five horses) or "quartering," with four horses, as in The Song of Roland and Child Owlet
- Attack/devouring by animals, such as dogs or wolves, as in Ancient Rome and the Biblical lion's den; by rodents (such as rats); by alligators or crocodiles, or carnivorous fish (such as piranhas or sharks); by crabs or by insects (such as ants)
- Venomous stings from scorpions and bites by snakes, spiders, etc.
- Snake pit
External links
- Internationalist Review Article published in the Internationalist Review on the evolution of execution methods in the United States