It’s one of the most hotly debated ethical questions of all time: Does The State ever
really have the authority to take a life?
That’s right – Capital Punishment, aka The Death Penalty.
It’s one of the least fun subjects to discuss, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fascinating,
and that’s what this video is all about.
You may think that you know all there is to know about death row, but we’re going to
prove you wrong with 50 insane, shocking facts about execution and the death penalty.
Buckle up – it’s going to get grim and gruesome.
50.
The death penalty is basically as old as written law itself.
The first recorded instance of the written death penalty occurred in the 18th Century
BC with the Code of King Hammurabi in Ancient Babylon.
It assigned the death penalty to 25 different crimes.
49.
US Capital punishment was a British import, and was essentially instated immediately after
the British invasion of North America.
The first man to be executed on US soil was Captain George Kendall in 1608, who was sentenced
to death for being a spy for Spain.
48.
While Britain got the US started on Capital Punishment, it was actually outlawed in England
in 1965.
The last two people executed in England were Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen, who were both
hanged the year before for murdering a friend for money.
47.
The Death Penalty is still legal in 56 countries.
The world’s top executors are: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia,
the US, Jordan, and Singapore.
46.
25 US States still have the Death Penalty, though its usage isn’t that frequent.
18 of these 25 states haven’t executed any inmates in the past five years, and twelve
of these states haven’t executed anyone in twelve years.
45.
The most popular method of execution in the modern United States is the lethal injection.
It’s a procedure that’s been frequently marred by controversy, as it isn’t performed
by trained medical professionals due to its breach of the Hippocratic Oath.
This has led to a number of infamous botched executions.
44.
The youngest person to be executed in modern history is George Stinney, a 14-year-old African
American boy from the state of South Carolina who was sentenced to die by the electric chair
in 1944.
A full 70 years later in 2014, a judge finally threw out the conviction and declared the
previous trial to have been in violation of Stinney’s constitutional rights.
Sadly, this was much too little and far too late to save his life.
43.
The oldest person to be executed in modern history is Walter Moody, an 83-year-old convict
in Alabama sentenced to die by the lethal injection in 1991.
His actual execution finally took place in 2018.
42.
While Walter Moody’s time on death row was definitely excessive, but not by all that
much.
The average wait on death row for a US convict is around 15 years.
41.
The US has executed over 1,500 death row inmates since 1976.
While a great number of these prisoners were likely guilty of their crimes, there’s also
a possibility – according to some claims – that around 4.1 % of those executed were
actually innocent, some of which have been officially exonerated by DNA evidence.
We sadly may never know the true number of innocent deaths.
40.
The world’s leading proponent of execution is China, believed to have executed somewhere
within the ballpark of 1,000 people annually, according to Amnesty International.
The true numbers are a little difficult to discern due to China’s extremely secretive
nature.
39.
China also has the dubious honour of being one of the world’s leading execution innovators.
According to anti-execution and torture charity Reprieve.org, China has taken to using mobile
“death vans”, where prisoners are strapped to electrical stretchers in the back of the
van before being injected with deadly chemicals.
The victim’s organs are harvested for transplant after death.
38.
Execution doesn’t just apply to humans.
In 1916, an elephant named Mary was executed via hanging after killing her trainer.
37.
But actual countries often aren’t much better.
As late as 2013, stoning women to death was still completely legal in 15 countries – including
Iran, Qatar, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia.
36.
In the US, the Death Penalty is extremely costly.
In Washington, trials that seek the death penalty tend to cost around a million dollars
more than the non-lethal alternative.
The death penalty has also cost California over four billion dollars since the late 1970s.
35.
Death row inmates are typically granted a last meal request by the state, and these
can be pretty strange.
Murderer Victor Feguer requested a single olive with the pit still in it, and bomber
Timothy McVeigh requested two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
34.
The price cap for last meals in Oklahoma is fifteen dollars, so if you plan on having
anything extravagant before you meet your maker, don’t commit a crime in Oklahoma.
Texas stopped offering last meals entirely in 2011.
33.
The turn of the millennium was a bad time to be a death row inmate.
The number of annual executions in the US peaked after a steady decline in 1999, with
the execution of 98 criminals by the end of the year.
32.
Uzbekistan has executed criminals by boiling them to death as late as 2002, so if you ever
visit, make sure you’re on your best behaviour.
31.
Two people executed in the United States between the dates of 1608 and 2002 had the stated
occupation of “playboy.”
30.
The most common occupation of people executed in the US in the last 400 years was “slave”,
accounting for 11.5 of all people executed in that time frame.
29.
The US has historically executed 15 people for the crimes of “sodomy, buggery, or bestiality.”
We won’t go into any more detail on that one.
28.
There’s a racial element to execution.
According to a 2003 study from Amnesty International, despite white and black murderers being relatively
equal in conviction, 80% of killers sentenced to death are black.
20% of these convicts were also convicted by all-white juries.
27.
Executions were public in the US all the way up until 1936, and were often considered a
family affair.
Now, we have horror and action movies instead.
26.
It was only in 2005 that the US Supreme Court officially declared it unconstitutional to
sentence juvenile criminals to death.
25.
Perhaps the most terrifying last words spoken by a death row inmate were that of vicious
serial killer and rapist Carl Panzram.
While he was preparing to be hanged, the wait time was beginning to frustrate him.
He yelled, “Hurry it up, you Hoosier b*stard!
I could hang a dozen men while you're screwing around!”
24.
Conversely, the funniest last words spoken by a Death Row inmate could probably be attributed
to criminal James D. French.
Before his execution on the electric chair, he supposedly said, "How's this for a headline?
'French Fries.'"
23.
Hanging, Drawing, and Quartering is a famously horrific method of execution used on criminals
like British Houses of Parliament Bomber Guy Fawkes.
It was declared cruel and unusual punishment, and thus unconstitutional, by the US Supreme
Court in 1878.
22.
Iwao Hakamada from Japan was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, spending
45 years awaiting execution.
However, Hakamada was freed after a judge threw out his initial conviction on the grounds
of faulty evidence.
He’s either very lucky or very unlucky, depending on your perspective.
21.
Actually being executed is a highly unlikely outcome of being sentenced to death, with
only 13% ever making it there.
The rest either have their convictions overturned, or die by other means, like suicide or natural
causes.
20.
While it was cancelled in 2012, China has such a large volume of executions that they
were able to host a successful TV talk show that interviews death row inmates and gets
their final thoughts before their execution.
19.
One of the most prolific executioners of the modern era was English pub-owner and professional
hangman Albert Pierrepoint, who pulled the lever on between 435 and 600 people during
his 25-year-career in the mid-20th century.
18.
The most prolific ancient executioner is believed to be Souflikar, Royal Gardener and executioner
for Mahomet IV of the Ottoman Empire.
He’s believed to have killed upwards of a thousand people with his bare hands on behalf
of his country.
17.
One of history’s most brutal methods of execution was Ling Chi, aka death by a thousand
cuts.
The victim is slowly mutilated with a knife before a final killing blow is struck against
the head or heart.
It was only banned in China in 1905.
16.
Another brutal form of historical execution is impalement, favoured by rulers like Vlad
of Wallachia.
It involved forcing a large wooden stake up the anus of a convicted prisoner until the
stake displaces their organs and kills them.
15.
In Saudi Arabia, the ancient Roman execution method of crucifixion is still very much on
the table.
Convicts are crucified, beheaded, and left on display as an example to others.
14.
The only country in Europe to continue performing executions in the 21st century is Belarus
in Eastern Europe, whose last execution was performed in 2019.
13.
The most infamous woman executed in the US was serial killer Aileen Wuornos, one of the
few female serial killers who didn’t use poison.
Poison, however, was used to kill her, via the lethal injection, in 2002.
12.
The lethal injection is typically a cocktail of three drugs: Midazolam, which sedates the
victim, Vercuronium Bromide, which paralyses the victim’s muscles, and finally Potassium
Chloride, which stops the heart.
11.
The infamous electric chair was invented over the course of nine years by a dentist named
Alfred Southwick, as a more humane way to execute prisoners.
10.
However, the first person executed by an electric chair was William Kemmler.
There were plenty of kinks in the system, and the electric chair essentially brutally
burned Kemmler to death over a torturous eight minutes.
9.
Hanging, one of the most popular methods of execution over history that still sees use
today, actually involves pretty exact mathematics.
The length of the rope must be judged in proportion to the weight of the victim – too short,
and the victim will be strangled rather than having their neck snapped.
Too long, and the victim’s velocity will build during the fall, and cause a messy decapitation.
8.
While the American South has the highest rate of executions in the United States, the region
actually has some of the largest crime figures, too – suggesting that the death penalty
may not actually work as the deterrent it’s often touted as.
7.
Executions became less frequent in the early US as states became wealthier and were able
to build larger prisons.
This indicates that the death penalty was a largely practical measure to save space
in overcrowded prisons.
6.
In Iran, homosexuality is still punishable by death.
One of the most frequently applied methods of execution for this is forcing the convict
to jump to their death from a high platform, such as a crane.
5.
One of the reasons behind China’s incredibly high rates of execution is the huge number
of crimes that carry the death penalty.
These include Arson, prostitution, and even tax fraud.
4.
Singapore takes a similar zero-tolerance attitude to drug offences, such as selling and trafficking.
Since 2010, Singapore has executed over thirty people for drug-related offences.
3.
The pre-Victorian era in Britain also executed people for some pretty weird and stupid reasons,
including “evidence of malice within a child” and “writing a threatening letter.”
Jephthah Big was executed for this reason in 1729.
In 1810, there were 222 crimes punishable by death in England.
2.
The modern US has sentenced a total of 8,440 inmates to death between 1977 and 2017.
That works out to around 2110 death sentences per decade, though the yearly number has thankfully
been on a steady decline since 1994.
1.
A Gallup poll from 2019 was one of the first ever to show that Americans slightly favour
life sentences over the death penalty, indicating that an abolishment of capital punishment
may be possible sometime in the foreseeable future.
There’s plenty of death row inmates out there who think this day can’t come soon
enough.
Now check out “The Horrible History of The Death Penalty” and “What Does The Last
24 Hours of a Death Row Prisoner Look Like in 2019.”