The practice of letting bodies hang on the gallows until they decayed continued until 1832. A man named James. Cook, the gallows and his rotting body attracted many Sunday strollers after he was put to death. Only after him did the bodies stop being displayed.
Arthur. Kestler, in his "Reflections" on hanging, tells us that in 19th-century Britain hangings were still carried out in elaborate ceremonies and were regarded by the elite as a spectacle of the highest importance. People could travel all over Britain to watch a proper hanging.
In 1807, more than four thousand people gathered to watch the executions of Holloway and Haggerty. After the ceremony, one hundred bodies were found trampled to death by the crowd. While the rest of Europe had abolished the death penalty in the second 0th century, England was still unanimously executing children as young as 7, 8 and 9 years old. Public hangings of children continued until 1833. The last child sentenced to death was a 9-year-old boy for stealing ink. He was eventually commuted due to a strong public outcry.
In the 19th century there were hanged men who were quickly hung on the gallows who were still alive fifteen minutes later. The number of condemned men who came back to life after more than half an hour on the gallows was also significant. Or in the 19th century, in the case of Grimm, when the victim was put in a coffin and came back to life.
An autopsy has almost always been performed since 1880, and it is not uncommon for "hanged men" to come back to life on the autopsy table.
No story is more incredible than that told to us by Arthur Kestler. Kestler tells us. Without evidence or from an eminent practitioner, it would be suspicious. In Germany, a hanged man woke up in the autopsy room, stood up and escaped with the help of the coroner.
In 1927, two British prisoners were taken from the gallows, and after fifteen minutes the two prisoners began to breathe again, and had to be hurriedly hung up again for a further thirty minutes.
Hanging was a "delicate art". In the first half of the 20th century, Britain formed several commissions to study the complexities of the death penalty. The Royal Commission (1945-1953), after studying various types of execution, concluded that the safest and quickest way to cause immediate death was to use a "long movable pedal under the gallows", which broke the cervical vertebrae as it fell heavily.
While many British hangmen have repeatedly claimed to have invented the "long pedal under the gallows," it is said to have been invented by the Irish in the 19th century. The "long pedal" centralized all the scientific laws of hanging.
The British, when they abolished the death penalty for common law crimes in December 1964, still claimed that in their country "hanging, at first barbaric, has been successfully civilized". This "English" style of hanging, which is now common throughout the world, has become more systematic. The prisoner's arms are tied behind his back, and he stands on a movable board, exactly where the two boards meet. These two boards are placed on a chain, supported by two iron bars, at the same level as the gallows floor. The pins are pulled with a donor stick or by cutting a thin rope, so that the two door panels are turned downward. Once the prisoner has stood on the movable boards, his feet are tied, and, depending on the country, the prisoner's head is covered with a hood, either white or black or light grayish-brown, showing only the two eyes. The rope was placed around the neck and the knot was tied in the left jaw. The rope spiraled around the top of the gallows and unfurled with the fall of the prisoner's body once the executioner moved the movable door panel. The twine was tied to the gallows by a system that allowed it to be retracted at will.
This last detail is the "virtue" of this type of execution. The length between the live knot and the knot tied to the gallows was in fact determined by the size and weight of the prisoner. In most countries, the hangman had some kind of a primer. Each hanging was carefully verified before it was carried out with a bag filled with sand equal to the prisoner's weight.
The dangers were also there. Either the rope wasn't long enough for the cervical vertebrae to break, and the prisoner died as slowly as before, or the rope was too long and fell from a height, breaking the prisoner's head. It is more appropriate that a person weighing 80 kilograms should preferably be dropped from 2. 4 meters. For every 3 kilogram increase in weight, the rope should be shortened by 5 centimeters.
Of course, the "index table" can be modified according to certain characteristics of the prisoner, such as: age, obesity, physical characteristics and even muscle characteristics.
In 1880, the press reported in detail the "resurrection" of a Hungarian by the name of Takács.
The man was hanged for ten minutes before being taken off the gallows, but came back to life half an hour later and died three days later. Doctors attributed this "abnormality" in the hanging to the extreme thickness of the prisoner's throat, the considerable bulging of the lymph glands, and, of course, to the fact that he had been taken off the gallows too soon.
Robert Goodall, the man who hanged him. The hangman who hanged Goodall was named Bailey, who had performed more than two hundred hangings before this and was, shall we say, very good at it. He made a calculation based on the weight of the prisoner and thought that he should fall from 2. 3 meters. However, through examination, he found that the muscles of the prisoner's neck were very weak, so he reduced the rope to 1. 72 meters, that is to say, 58 centimeters shorter. This improvement was still not enough, however, because Guderdahl's neck was even weaker than it appeared to be, and in the end the rope cut off his head.
The same gruesome results have been seen in France, Canada, the United States and Austria. California St. Quentin prison warden Wotan. Clinton. Duffer, who has watched and commanded more than one hundred and fifty hangings and gassings, gives the following description of one hanging where the rope was too long: "The face of the Lenten man was torn to pieces. His head was half hanging from his torso, his eyes bulged out, his veins burst, and his tongue was no longer in shape." He also emphasized the stench of urine and feces that were drying out. He also described another hanging where the rope was too short this way, "He was slowly strangled, and for a quarter of an hour he breathed heavily, like a pig snorting.
"The prisoner's whole body shook from top to bottom, like a toy yoyo (a toy with a thread that raised and lowered a small disk along a line). In order to keep the rope from breaking in the trembling, the executioner had to hold the prisoner's legs so tightly that the prisoner turned blue and his tongue swelled."
To avoid similar disappointments, Pierrepoint, the last executioner of the British Crown, used to auscultate each prisoner through the eye-tax ring in his workshop a few hours before the execution.
Pierre Poins said that no more than ten or twelve seconds elapsed between the time he took the prisoner into his studio and the time he operated the prying root of the movable plate. In some other prisons the studio was farther from the gallows, but he was sure that the time taken never exceeded twenty-five seconds.
But were speedy executions evidence of an efficiency that could not be denied?
The coroner of the North London borough, who examined the bodies of fifty-eight executed persons, proved that after hanging. The real cause of death was dislocation of the cervical vertebrae, tearing of the spinal cord or crushing of the iron. These conditions rendered the prisoner immediately unconscious and difficult to regain consciousness, while the heart continued to beat for 15 to 30 minutes, but the pathologist concluded that "it was purely a conscious movement".
In the United States, a coroner once opened the chest of a hanged man and, after half an hour, had to stop the prisoner's heartbeat by hand "like the pendulum of a clock".
Customs relating to ropesThe nature and quality of the rope was important in a hanging, and the executioner had to choose it carefully as part of his duties. Rule. Mordaan, nicknamed the "Prince of Executioners", worked solemnly for twenty years, from 1874 to 1894.
He had rope made to order. Hemp fibers were selected in Kentucky, unified in St. Louis, braided into rope in Fort Smith, and then knotted so that the rope would be smooth when knotted. No more elasticity. He coated the rope with a mixture of mainly vegetable oil. George. Mordaan also holds a record that has never been broken; one of his ropes was used twenty-seven times, Another extremely important factor is the knot. It is an accepted opinion that to tie a good live knot the rope must be able to slip through thirteen spirals coming from the tassels. However, there are never more than eight or nine fringes to make a "dark gray curl" about ten centimeters long. Once the rope is around the prisoner's neck, it must be tightened. However, it must not exert any pressure on the prisoner's circulation.
The knot is tied behind the left jawbone, just below the ear. After the position of the knot is determined. The executioner sprouts a length of rope, which is adjusted accordingly to the weight, age, physical condition, or certain physical features of the prisoner, etc. In 1905, in Chicago, the murderer Robert. Galtine escaped hanging because his cervical vertebrae and their tissues were so badly ossified that he could not be put to death. The rules of the Unified Penal Code state that the heavier the prisoner, the shorter the rope.
There are a number of "weight-rope" indexes to avoid suffocating the prisoner if the rope is too short and "taking his head off" if it is too long.
Hanging around the world is legal under civil and military law in seventy-seven countries and territories. These are: South Africa, Albania, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bermuda, Burma, Botswana, Brunei, Burundi, Cameroon, CIS, South Korea, Dominica, and the United States. "Dominica, Egypt", United States of America", Ethiopia, Fiji, Gambia, Grenada, Equatorial Guinea", Guyana, Hong Kong, China, Hungary", Cayman Islands, England and Wales, India "Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lesotho, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya. Liberia", Libya", Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, Montserrat, Namibia, Nepal", Nigeria", New Zealand, Uganda", Pakistan, New Guinea, Poland ", Qatar", Central Africa, Netherlands, Saint Kitts and Nevis, to Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Sierra Leone", Singapore, Slovakia", Sudan", Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Syria, Tanzania, Czech Republic, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Zaire and Zimbabwe. The name of a country or territory followed by a "." , means that hanging is not the only death penalty in these countries or regions. Depending on the nature of the crime and the verdict of the court, the prisoner can also be sentenced to robbery or neo-prisoner's death.
The heart still beats!
A 1942 law in Britain stipulated that in such cases, the body would be hanged for at least another hour and the doctor on duty should make a statement of death. Until the death penalty was abolished in 1968, Austria's penal code still required the three-hour precaution.
The archivist at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, an official institution, confirmed that in six of thirty-six autopsies, the heart beat for a further seven hours after the execution, and for five hours in the case of two others.
A prominent criminologist once noted, "The work of those who have not studied the art of hanging is not nearly cleaned up, and they make the unfortunate criminals endure long and senseless tortures." We remember the execution of Mr. Thompson, the real butcher, in II923, which was so gruesome that it almost made the hangman attempt suicide as well.
Since American hangmen-"the best in the world"-have also encountered the horrific catastrophes we have just mentioned, what can we say about the post-World War I world's hangings around the world after World War I. What more can we say?
Something terrible happened in Germany and Austria in 1946, both during the execution of Nazi war criminals and in the aftermath of the Nuremberg Proceedings. Even with the modern method of "long movable treads under the gallows," guards sometimes had to pull the prisoner's feet down in order to end the hanging.
In a public hanging in Kuwait in 1981, the executioner miscalculated the length of the rope and the prisoner fell with insufficient force to break his cervical vertebrae, so that he suffocated to death in almost ten minutes.
In Africa, where the "British" style of hanging is preferred, using a gallows and a movable wrench but still requiring knowledge of how to operate it, the hanging of four former ministers in Kinshasa in June 1966, which was reported in the Illustrated Paris Match, was more like torture than an execution. The
The prisoners were stripped down to a pair of shorts, with both hands tied behind their backs. "The rope was suspended and the upper part of the prisoner's body was above the door panel. From below, his legs and buttocks could be seen. The whole body suddenly stiffens and that's the end of it."
Evaliste. Kimba died quickly. But the second, Emmanuel. Bomba was quite strong and his cervical vertebrae were not broken. He died slowly, asphyxiated, and it wasn't as if his body didn't put up a frantic resistance. Eventually, his ribs protruded and blood stained the autopsy table. From the EKG, the heartbeat started fast, gradually evened out. Then it slowed and stopped beating by the seventh minute.
Fourteen minutes before his death Alexander. Mahomba also died quickly, but Jér?me. Anani's death was the longest, most agonizing, and most horrific of the four. He was dying for fourteen minutes. "He was not hung well; perhaps a movement at the last second made the rope slip, or perhaps the rope had not been properly tied in the first place; at any rate, it was evident that the rope had been slipped over the prisoner's left ear. For fourteen minutes the prisoner's legs were in a constant fidget, twitching in fits and starts, shaking incessantly forward, backward, and in every direction, and even bending two or three times, and the effort of the muscles and thighs to twitch seemed to give him a brief and absurd hope of extricating himself from death. But then the struggles suddenly diminished and the body stiffened almost simultaneously."
President's WordsArgentine President Karlo. Menem announced in 1991 that he wanted to reinstate the death penalty in his country's penal code.
Peruvian President Alberto. Fijimori in 1992 considered reapplying the death penalty, abolished in 1979, to peacetime criminals.
In 1991, in Brazil, a proposal to change the constitution was sent to Congress. It called for the death penalty for certain criminals.
In Papua New Guinea. all criminals were exempted from the death penalty in 1974, but in August 1991 the government reinstated the death penalty for blood crimes and premeditated murder.
In the Philippines, the death penalty was reinstated in December 1993 for homicide, rape, infanticide, hostage-taking, and aggravated graft and bribery. Previously. The country used the electric chair, which jubilantly opted for the gas chamber.
The last meal of the United States recently published a horrible and absurd book, which lists some of the most elaborate and appetizing menu booked by death row inmates before being put to death. At Cummings Prison in the United States, a prisoner being led to his execution pointed to his after-dinner sweet and said, "I'll finish it when I come back."
The ancient unification punishment, a rope around the neck, is the most traditional hanging there is, but many more brutal hangings exist. The Romans and many Eastern peoples hanged prisoners by their hair and genitals. Hanging by the genitals was popular in medieval Europe, but the more intolerable form of hanging was to have an iron hook driven through the muscles and the bones of the camel, and then the prisoner was held in the air, either in front or behind. Generally, the hooks were always tightly constructed around the ribs of the prisoner. Sometimes the prisoner's pectoral muscles were quite well developed and were able to bear their own weight without being torn. In medieval Japan, the penal code stipulated that the ribs of the prisoner be held with an iron gauntlet until death, and in early 18th-century Turkey, hanging was practiced by gauntleting the hands and feet of the prisoner on the same side of the body, and in the 18th century, the British used the gauntlet to hang the prisoner. The British did the same in their African colonies. They hanged rebellious natives by means of a yoke constructed under their arms or over their ribs, and then left them to struggle for days in this horrible torture. This is perhaps following the practice of the Arab negro slave traders. In Algiers and Ta?, too, the prisoners are thus positioned by hooks and hung on the high walls of the courthouse.
DecapitationDecapitation is based on the principle of cutting the neck, that is, separating the head from the torso. This type of capital punishment is not meant to cause dismemberment of the prisoner's limbs, but because the amputated part is quite important and can lead to immediate death. Throughout the diversity and brutality of the various forms of capital punishment, decapitation has always been considered a "simple" form of capital punishment. Beheading has been practiced in Asia and the East since before the beginning of time. It is even certain that beheading came into being during the Bronze Age with the introduction of hand-held weapons.
Ancient justice permitted decapitation in certain cases which did not fall under the penalties of fire, strangulation, and death by stoning. A shallow relief tells us that decapitation was practiced in Egypt during the reign of Launcelot II.
According to the Book of Deuteronomy (the fifth of the Five Books of Moses), Hebrew law also imposed beheading for certain crimes.
Erod, governor of the tetrarchate of Galilee. Philip's daughter, the Jewish princess Salome, had been from her uncle Erode.
Ontipa's hand to St.. Jean. Baptiste's head, the latter having been executed by decapitation according to the criminal law then in force in the kingdom.
In Rome, the "iron death penalty" was quickly recognized by the nobility. Although Christian martyrs are memorialized mainly as circus animals and crucifixes, we remember when Christians were inhabitants of the Roman city-state.
They were, however, being put to a new capital punishment.
The future St. Cecil and her husband Valesian came from prominent aristocratic families, but they were both beheaded.
The squire's unsure triple slash failed to cut off Cecil's head because the law said no more could be cut. The doer left Cecil in a pool of blood, half-dead, and in the end she lived for three more days.
St. Felicity was a Roman noblewoman who, along with her seven sons, was a Christian. After Felicity was denounced for refusing to renounce her original religion, she and all of her children were sentenced to death, and three of them had their heads killed along with hers. Another famous example concerns St. Paul and his brother St. John, both of whom had been officials, one a riding instructor in the family of Constance, daughter of King Constantine, and the other a grand steward. According to tradition, Julian. When Apostle ascended the throne, they resigned from all official duties and lived a life of seclusion.
Sentenced to death because of their Christian faith, they demanded that since they were citizens of the city they should be judged in Rome. In the end they were beheaded at night because the king feared that their public execution would cause riots in Rome.
Also beheaded were Sts. Placid, St. Lucius, St. Christophe and about a dozen others.
Daniel. Ropes, in his "History of the Church of Christ," paraphrases an ancient writer, who tells us that the number of Christians to be slain was so great as to terrify the executioner, and to make him suspect that it would tire his arm and sword. So he lined up the martyrs in a line "so that with a rush he could cut off the heads of his victims one by one."
"He came up with this method in order not to interrupt his work, for had he stood in the same place to administer it, the pile of corpses would have prevented him from continuing."
During the reign of the Christian kings, the crucifixion was often replaced by decapitation because of the unpleasantness of the image of the martyrdom of Jesus, and beheading was thus more common.
Some of the "pre-beheaders" have gone down in history for their indiscriminate use of this punishment. Charlemagne beheaded over 4,000 people at Wealden during his mission to the Saxons.
Richard. Cole. De. Lyon killed two and a half thousand Islamists in the Holy Land under the pretext that the ransom money for the Islamists was not arriving fast enough.
Pierre. Le. Glenn I ordered the killing of hundreds of Streuli's rebels in 1698, and he and his advisors killed dozens more with their own hands.
In France, the Duke of Guise not only killed almost all of Lenoti's Protestant group, but also put dozens of religious reformers to the new head at Amboise.
But the top of the "honor roll" (if we dare to use that word) is none other than China's Shih Huangdi, the man who ordered the construction of the Great Wall, and who, in order to firmly establish his regime, in 234 B.C.E., ordered the killing of 100,000 people.
Decapitation is also practiced in Africa. Laurent. Verneuve has mentioned a certain man named Erschar, who was a guest of King Beyoncé in the nineteenth century, and who has left a story of great detail, from which we may read the following:
"They made me climb a high platform, on the opposite side of which were the heads of men arranged in neat rows.
"All the soil was soaked with blood. On the heads of these prisoners of war consumed the art of vicious torture ...... This was not all! The people brought eighty wicker baskets or baskets, each containing a living person, with the head exposed.
"The people lined them up before the king, and then one by one they moved them quickly from the height of the platform to the plaza, where many were dancing, singing, and shouting loudly about the windfall ...... The lucky Dahomeans who were able to seize a victim cut off his head, he would immediately be able to exchange his booty for a bounty - a string of small shells (a form of currency) ...... Finally, three more groups of prisoners were brought in, and in order to prolong the time of execution, their necks were cut off bit by bit with notched knives. "
SEVEN HUNDRED EXECUTIONS A YEAR We know that swords are not just used to cleanly cut necks. We have to admit that in the East and Asia, especially in India and Persia, prisoners were often made to suffer before they died, a tactic little known in Europe.
The neck is torn or sliced little by little instead of being cut, thus inflicting wounds of greater or lesser size. Another type of execution involved sawing off the head with a sword, which meant that the sharp blade moved back and forth constantly, slowly sawing off the prisoner's neck with the weight of the sword itself.
As we mentioned above, decapitation has no connection with torture in Europe, but it is one of the extreme punishments practiced in every country. It is recorded in all the old European chronicles.
Depending on the country, decapitation was carried out with an axe, as in England, Russia and Germany, or with a sword, as in France, Italy and Spain. The Arabian kingdoms, on the other hand, preferred knives. The tools used, though different, were generally more like axes in the northern countries, while swords were more often used in the Latin countries.
In England, during the reign of Henry VIII, there were more than seven hundred executions a year, two-thirds of which were carried out with the axe. The dictator himself did not hesitate to kill two of the six wives he married in succession - one Anna. Bolin and Katarina. Howard was executed by decapitation.
In 2554, by Mary. Tidower's order, the axe decapitated the seventeen-year-old princess Jeanne. Grey, her husband and her father.1587 By order of Isabette I, Mary Queen of Scots. Stewart was decapitated, and the axe eventually took her life. 1649 Charles I of England had his neck chopped off by an axe at Whitehall.
Beheading faded away in England in the early 18th century and was replaced by hanging. In Russia, Katarina abolished beheading. But beheading was still practiced in Germany along the Rhine in the early 19th century and reappeared under the Third German Reich, where Nazis used it along with guillotining and hanging. For example, Von, who was accused of burning the Reichstag. Lubow was beheaded with an axe. After him until 1945, hundreds of prisoners were executed by this ancient form of capital punishment. In Marigny, today's Belgium, it is recorded in the archives that in the twenty years between 1370 and 1390, *** six hundred and seventy-five people were executed by capital punishment, two hundred and seventy-seven of them by axe.
Axes were also used in France and Italy, but soon there was a difference between an axe and a carving. Gradually certain classes of prisoners were no longer executed with the commoner's instrument, the axe, but died by the sword, the weapon of the nobility. Then beheading, which was intended for all classes of society, became the privilege of the nobility, while the commoners were mainly hanged and wheeled.
From then on, beheading was used only by the nobles, and in general was rarely carried out. The customary practice was for the executioner to divide the body of the decapitated person into four pieces and hang them by the city gates, with the head pinned to the top of a pillar at the place of execution. This gruesome custom also disappeared at the beginning of the ask century.
It was extremely shameful in Europe to be executed in any other way than by the sword. Brant?me tells us that in order to combat the indecency of certain gentlemen at his court, Fran?ois I promised to hang those who offended women "without mercy". The Orne affair was another example.
Henri. De. The Count d'Orne, grandson of the Prince de Ligny and cousin of the Regent, with the help of his accomplices, under the pretext of negotiating a deal for 100,000 ecu, trapped a speculator, whom two men killed and skinned. The two murderers were arrested, and when the case was opened, the judge, feeling embarrassed, went to the Regent and asked his opinion, to which the latter replied, "The court should act impartially."
The fact that the victim was a Jew was to Orna an excuse for his murder. The judges, also believing that the regent would forgive his relative, sentenced the two murderers to sentences on wheels corresponding to their crimes.
It soon became clear to the families of the two convicts that they would not be pardoned and demanded at least decapitation. They pleaded that the wheel sentence was the most shameful death sentence and that all the families and the Regent himself were ashamed of it, since the latter was related to the Count of Orne. For this reason the Regent used Thomas. Gaunay's poem in retort: "It is the crime that is shameful, not the gallows."
The success of a beheading depended entirely on the torturer. Depending on the varying abilities of the torturer, the head sometimes rolled off with a single slash, and sometimes it required several consecutive cuts. The instrument of justice was usually a heavy instrument with a very wide and long blade and a pointed head.
The sword used for executions, called a "blade", had to be held with both hands, so it took some very strong men to handle this instrument of justice. It cuts powerfully at the prisoner.
The torturer turns the instrument three times above the head to get the force of the blow, then slashes hard into the back of the head.
But it wasn't easy, as the neck was stronger than one might think because of the spinal column. Many reports of executions mention that the sword chipped when the decapitation was administered. A bill from 1476, for example, tells us that the executioner in Paris spent sixty sous "to repair the sword that had been chipped during the execution of Louis. de. Luxembourg", who was beheaded on the orders of Louis XI. In 1792, the official executioner of Paris appealed to the Minister: "Swords are so easily damaged that they cannot be used after each execution. If the same sword is to be used for several executions at the same time, the sword definitely needs to be resharpened and re-sharpened. It is also worth mentioning that the sword often breaks during such executions."
There was only one way to decapitate with an axe: the prisoner rested his neck on an anvil and the heavy axe came down hard.
Decapitation with the sword had the same purpose as the former, to separate the head from the body, but there were several processes.
In the first type of decapitation with an axe, the prisoner kneels, with his head resting on an anvil and his hands tied behind his back. Of course, in some cases the prisoner's hands were free. For example, De. Mr. Tou and Seck. Mars' hands were free when he was beheaded.
In the second, the prisoner knelt, stood, or sat on his heels, with his head in the center of his body and his chin resting on his chest, so that the torturer could see his neck. The prisoner's hands are often tied in front.
The third type, the prisoner is tortured standing. This was the least and most difficult method of decapitation. This method was very dangerous; the executioner could not be sure of accurately laying down the knife, and the prisoner was at risk of being struck on the head or shoulders.
Standing beheadings, which require extreme dexterity on the part of the executioner, are most commonly used in China. It was used mainly to punish important people who had access to the emperor, while ordinary prisoners were tortured on their knees.
Standing beheading is also practiced in some Persian Gulf countries and in Yemen, where two prisoners who attempted to murder Imam Mansour were publicly executed in 1962 in Taiz Grand Square.
There have been very few standing beheadings in the judicial history of France, the most famous probably being the Bare riding of the earth. Some say the 19-year-old young nobleman failed to salute the ceremonial procession, others say he destroyed a cross with a statue of Jesus. Because of his "high treason and blasphemy, he committed the monstrous and abominable crime of desecration of a holy thing," he was railroaded standing up in a woodpile.
The torturer's bad intentions were executed at Tower Hill in 1685 by Jacques, Duke of Monty. Scott's capital punishment was brutal. With the first cut, the executioner left the son of Charles II only slightly wounded. Monty raised his head and looked with reproachful eyes at the executioner, John. Ketchum.
John. Quechu proceeded to strike three more times, but the head wobbled spasmodically for a few moments without separating from the body. There were shouts from the crowd. The executioner cursed and said, as he threw the axe, "Set up courage." The Sheriff demanded that he proceed, and the people threatened to climb the guillotine and kill Quechu. The latter had to take up the axe again and make two more cuts, but it still did not work. At last he was obliged to take out his own pocket-knife and cut off the Duke's head.
Two precious heads of love made the Duchess of Nevers and Marguerite. De. Valois, two noble women who did a strange thing.
The former had a lover, Anibal of Piedmontese ancestry. The Count of Cocona, and the lover of the latter was the lord of Moller.
These two men served the Duke of Alonzo, brother of Charles IX, and they became famous at St. I Barthelemy for a lamentable passion. At that time the king was very ill and would soon bid farewell to the world. They were also involved in the conspiracy in order that those close to the king might place the crown on the head of the Duke of Alonzo after the king's death, instead of that of the King of Poland, who was soon to be crowned, his brother Henry III.
But the plot was foiled, and Cocona and Moller senior went to the guillotine in April, 1574. After the beheading, the Duchesse de Nevers and Marguerite. De. Valois got the heads of their two lovers, and to preserve them they called for the use of embalming spices. Alexandre Dumas brought these two women to the stage in "Queen Margot", and Stendhal also recalled the episode of applying embalming spices to the heads when he wrote "The Red and the Black".
A copy of Miracle Under the Anvil signed by Clément. Janan, published in 1889 in the archives of Dijon, on the C?te d'Or, describes an incident (perhaps the only one of its kind in the world) in which a prisoner was pardoned because of the clumsiness of the executioner. The situation was that of an Elena. A noblewoman named Elena Guillet had been sentenced to be executed for infanticide. In front of a large crowd, the executioner, Simon Grandjean, was sentenced to death for the crime of infanticide. The executioner, Simon Grandjean, who was more accustomed to torture than to beheading, did not cut down the victim.
"The shouts of the crowd agitated him even more, and he made several cuts, but only severely bruised the young woman of twenty-two and failed to remove the head. The crowd became even more furious, and the executioner dropped his sword and fled into the chapel built at the foot of the guillotine, trying to hide. His wife, who had been helping him, wanted to end the execution. The increasingly angry crowd threw a large number of stones at her, and she tried to strangle the prisoner with a rope, but still could not end his life. The executioness then took the scissors she had brought with her to cut the prisoner's hair and tried to cut her throat. It still didn't work.
She then took the scissors and poked at the prisoner." The enraged in-group swarmed the guillotine, grabbed the executioness and her husband and killed them. And most incredibly, the surgeon revived Elena. Gilles. Faced with this unique spectacle, Louis XIII signed a letter of pardon and allowed the man who had been shown the miracle to be in Bourg. Anne. Bresse convent for the rest of her life.
He wanted to die standing ......
Given his age and