A rebellious gang of teenagers feel like causing some trouble. They go out at night, blackening
their faces so no one will spot them. For no reason at all, these unruly kids just start
cutting down trees, and after that they find a rabbit warren and take a rabbit or two just
because... well, because they feel like it. They take things a step further when they
get into the town, and there they pickpocket a man and take a watch which in today’s
money is worth about 40 bucks. The last thing they do on this crime spree is mindlessly
wreck a fish pond. The teens then hang up their gloves and call it a night, only to
be arrested the next morning as they chow down on their porridge. Can you guess how
many capital crimes they committed that night? Answer: A lot.
In the late 17th century there were around 50 crimes in England that were punishable
by death, but by the end of the 18th century that number was more like 220. One of the
crimes those kids committed that could have seen them hanged was blackening their faces
at night with the intent to commit a crime. Shoe polish was for shoes, not faces. They
could have also been hanged for cutting down trees, stealing a rabbit, stealing something
worth about five shillings – 40 bucks today – and they could have also faced the gallows
for doing that destruction job on the fish pond.
Some of those offenses you will no doubt agree are not exactly major crimes, but the English
invented these strict measures because they thought they would prevent crimes from happening
in the first place. Some people at the time said there was no other country on the planet
where so many crimes were punishable by death. Being a teen back then was risky to say the
least, at least if you were the kind who broke a few rules now and again.
As you will find out, things improved, but in the era of what’s been called the time
of the “Bloody Code” things were pretty crazy. In the 60 years between 1770 and 1830,
around 7,000 people were executed in England and Wales.
When we say “kids” could get in serious trouble in England we are not only talking
about people in their late teens. A lot of actual children went to the gallows too. There
is a recording at a church in England that tells us a girl by the name of Alice Glaston
was hanged in 1546, and she was only 11 at the time. The information about that event
doesn’t tell us what crime she had committed, but we are hoping she did more than steal
someone’s prized vegetable. Kids had no protections from hanging, and at one point
in time you could read in the law that “strong evidence of malice in a child of 7 to 14 years
of age” could result in them going to the gallows.
During the hanging frenzy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries quite a few kids
were hanged for crimes such as breaking into a house, stealing from a shop or even forgery,
while other teens were executed for worse crimes such as murder.
Let’s now have a look at when hanging started, when it went disastrously wrong, and how it
ended… well mostly ended. You might be surprised to hear that this kind of punishment is still
around in some places. Hanging as an execution wasn’t exactly a
science when it first came about. There’s evidence of hanging in Roman Law and you can
see that it happened in ancient Greece as well. You can also read that it was often
the go-to form of capital punishment as early as the fifth century in England. There is
a history of hanging as a form of capital punishment all over the world, so it’s better
if we concentrate on one place. England seems to be the place to start, because those guys
perfected the procedure. By the time the 12th century came about in
England, hanging was the number one form of execution. Sure, they had burning at the stake
as an option and the very worst of criminals might find themselves being sentenced to being
drawn and quartered, but hanging-to-death was by far the most popular way to kill a
criminal. In the beginning, hanging was a simple affair.
The person to be hanged would be tied in a noose which was often fixed to a crossbeam
that was attached to two vertical beams. That’s the way it stayed in the early centuries
and throughout the medieval period, but things called human rights started to change that
process. At the end of the 18th century people started questioning whether small crimes should
result in hanging. It seemed rather unfair to some progressives that someone should go
to the gallows for a petty theft from a store or impersonating someone else.
Times were changing, but we should say England wasn’t exactly modernizing at high speed.
In 1776, a newspaper in England called the Hereford Journal reported about the hanging
of a 15-year old girl named Susanna Underwood. She was sent to the gallows for the crime
of burning down a barn, but rather than the newspaper writing about how terrible it was
to execute someone so young for a crime that wasn’t that bad, it criticized her for her
bad manners. The stubborn girl had refused to shake the hand of her master before she
was hanged, wrote the newspaper. Tut, tut. Young folks would still get hanged for years
to come, but in the 19th century the government started commuting more capital crimes and
lessening the ridiculous number of offenses for which someone could go to the gallows.
It wouldn’t be until 1908 that laws were passed saying that anyone under the age of
16 couldn’t get the death penalty, and on the run up to that date the crimes for a death
sentence were limited to what would be considered major ones today, such as murder, treason
or spying. In 1839, the English did their last beheading
and quartering spectacle, and so the way forward from there was mostly death by hanging.
While all this was going on, some people wanted to improve the way people were hanged. In
the past there was the goal post structure and also the structure that looks a bit like
the way you play that game called “hangman.” This was called gibbetting but as the 19th
century got under way it was seen as a somewhat old school method.
The people who were hanged this way might also have been fastened in chains, but the
British government abolished this around the same time people were wondering how to hang
a person with a little more humanity – if that is even possible.
The style of hanging that was used was called the short drop, and it was about as basic
as hanging can get. You’ve all heard the expression to kick the bucket, and that’s
kind of what a short drop consisted of. A person stood on a small platform, his head
fastened in a noose, and that platform was then removed from under the feet of that person.
Ouch. It was painful and death wasn’t fast, and thankfully some kind-hearted people came
up with better ways to hang a person. It was an Irish scientist named Samuel Haughton
that came up with a better way, and in 1866 his paper titled, "On hanging considered from
a Mechanical and Physiological point of view” was published to a lot of fanfare.
This guy would go on to serve on the “Capital Sentences Committee” and he devised a way
in which a person would die quickly from a broken neck, not strangulation. He worked
out that a standard drop between 4 and 6 feet (1.2 and 1.8 meters) should be enough to do
the trick and the person would die quickly. It didn’t always work out right, though,
and so the British Home Office worked on a way to make the drop more measured and effective.The
condemned man or woman’s weight would be compared to an official Table of Drops to
determine the exact height they should use. In 1888, if you were 182 pounds (82½ kg)
your drop from the scaffold would have been 6 feet 11 inches (211 cm). This was achieved
byway of a handy trap door, which the condemned was forced to stand over.
When it went right, the hanging would result in the dislocation of the vertebrae and often
the rupturing of the jugular vein. When it went wrong, such as when the drop was too
much the person’s head would come off, and that wasn’t what the people wanted to see.
Execution was a public spectacle after all and this actually happened lots of times,
such as in a famous case in 1901 involving U.S. outlaw Tom Edward Ketchum. His rope was
too long and off came his head. Sometimes the contraption just didn’t work
at all, with the most famous case being that of the so-called “man they couldn’t hang”.
They tried three times to hang John "Babbacombe" Lee and each time they failed. The trapdoor
just wouldn’t open, so after three grueling attempts they just gave up. The guy had been
through enough. He was imprisoned after the hanging debacle and some years later released.
Around this time many countries were working on their hanging technique, because a headless
criminal just didn’t look good. In 1930, a woman named Eva Dugan was hanged in Arizona
and that really turned out to be a dark day for all involved. The science didn’t work
for Eva, and she was decapitated. Maybe even worse is the fact her head rolled in the direction
of nearby public spectators. At the sight of that, three men and two women fainted.
The science proved difficult and hangings went wrong time and again. In Canada in 1919
a man named Antonio Sprecage was hanged and it took one hour and eleven minutes before
he finally expired and the surgeons present declared the man dead.
The British hangman Albert Pierrepoint hanged hundreds of people in the first part of the
20th century and he was quite serious about his job. Sometimes the entire hanging process,
from the man leaving his cell to actually being hanged would be completed in a matter
of seconds. The faster it was the less distress was caused to the condemned. Or at least that
was the theory. For Pierrepoint, it was of the greatest importance to give the condemned
person some amount of dignity and certainly not botch the job and cause them to suffer.
After his retirement Pierrepoint stated that he wasn’t sure the death penalty worked.
He said, “If hanging is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree. There have been murders since
the beginning of time, and we shall go on looking for deterrents until the end of time.”
He said that he was not sure he ever prevented anyone from murdering.
As you might expect, Pierrepoint took a lot of flak for this. His long-time assistant
wasn’t too keen on what he said, stating, “I just could not believe it. When you have
hanged more than 680 people, it's a hell of a time to find out you do not believe capital
punishment achieves anything.” Maybe if hanging criminals is the order of
the day, and if you think you’re the right man for the job and can cause the least amount
of distress and pain, then you should do the job.
The last two people to be hanged in the UK were a pair named Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen
in 1964. They had killed a man and got away with some cash, which amounted to the grand
total of about $13. Things went to the plan the day of the execution at least, with the
assistant hangman calling it a “run-of-the mill execution.”
Hanging then disappeared from most countries around the world. The last public hanging
in the U.S. happened in 1936, although some states still had hanging on their list of
possible methods of execution for quite some time to come. In 1996, Billy Bailey was the
last man ever to be hanged in the U.S. He was a big guy, weighing about 220 pounds (100kg).
With that in mind, officials estimated the correct drop to be 5 feet (1.5 meters).
Bailey had actually chosen hanging as the way to go, although as of 2019 it’s in only
New Hampshire where this is still possible in the U.S. When the day came he had no final
words. He stood on the scaffold on a cold night at the Delaware Correctional Center
and had his ankles chained. A hood was put over his head and the noose was fastened under
his chin. The warden then took a step backwards and
pulled a lever. The trapdoor opened and the rope, with Billy on the end of it, became
taut about 10 feet from the ground. His prison jacket flapped in the cold wind as his body
rotated one way and then another. The execution was said to have gone “without
complication” although the man’s pulse beat for around 11 minutes. The heart goes
on even when the person is assumed to have no thoughts or pain left, but then again,
no one will ever know what those last few moments dangling from a rope are like.
We think after that you might need a bit of cheering up, so we have two shows for you
that should make you laugh and bring some light back into your world. Have a look at
these two hilarious videos, “I Spent 7 Days In Bed and This Is What Happened” or for
a different kind of humor, “Why Flat Earthers Are Dead Wrong.”