Above is an illustration entitled, “Public hanging of witches.” It is from Sir George Macenzie’s Law and Customs in Scotland in Matters Criminal, Edinburgh, 1678.
The British Gazette is firmly of the opinion that the death penalty should remain a thing of the past. Clearly however many think otherwise. Apart from hanging drawing and quartering, beheading and burning at the stake, the traditional form of execution (for civilians) in this country has been hanging. For a long time the method of hanging was by asphyxiation. Later the less cruel method of severing the upper spinal column by the use of the technique known as the long drop was used.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran they still use the old method of asphyxiation and carry these executions out in public. In the days when such took place in Britain it was treated as a public spectacle and many turned out to view the hanging.
On 15th July 2007, Iranian authorities hanged two men and one woman in public in the north-western province of East Azerbaijan. The three were hanged in public in the provincial capital Tabriz. The woman was accused of murder and conspiring to kill. It was removed from the web by YouTube.
Is this what you would want for such as the Soham murderer Ian Huntley?
Speaking the Truth unto the Nation
The answer to your question, which following your gruesome clip of an Iranian style execution by hanging may surprise you, is yes.
To hang, or not to hang? Surely the question should be whether to execute or not execute murderers, those who themselves have killed in cold blood?
There are many methods of execution and lethal injection is probably the most humane, though the Russian method of putting an unexpected bullet through the back of the murderers head comes a close second.
Does anyone, except for our woolly minded liberals, believe that the threat of the death penalty will not act as a deterrent?
Why should murders be kept alive, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds, when they have deprived some innocent of theirs?
By pretending that corporal and capital punishment are uncivilised, was uncivilised in itself, for a civilised society protects its citizens from murderers by ensuring they can never kill again.
My only problem with the death penalty is the lying nature of the police.
I have known too many instances where the police have lied to get a conviction and so an innocent person goes to jail. You cannot reverse the death of someone and I would hate for me or a loved one to die because of police deceit.
But in principle, for sure, kill the dogs.
Tony Butler,
Why don’t people like you look at the facts before you talk about a subject. In the US it is actually MORE expensive to execute them due to the amount spent on the appeals process. Also those states with the death penalty have higher murder rates, so it’s NOT a deterrent.
Superficially, hanging (or any form of execution) might be thought to be an appropriate form of disposal of someone who has murdered. But now and again (not often) people have been found guilty of murders that they have not in fact committed.
The most notorious example is the case of Timothy Evans, a young man with an IQ of 70 and not well able to give an account of himself. His wife was murdered by John Christie, but Evans was convicted of it, and executed. Subsequently, Christie was convicted of that and other murders and he too was executed.
The fact that it can happen at all is a powerful argument against capital punishment, and the reason why we should not have it.
~ I note the video was removed. No surprise there. The above comments are very interesting. Hanging does not stop murders. There were any number of murders committed after someone convicted was executed. In the case of a wrongful conviction, the state cannot bring the dead back. We must remain opposed to the death penalty.