Hanging

The short drop is a method of hanging in which the condemned prisoner stands on a raised support, such as a stool, ladder, cart, horse, or other vehicle, with the noose around the neck.

It was considered a humane improvement on the short drop because it was intended to be enough to break the person's neck, causing immediate unconsciousness and rapid brain death.

[7][8] This method was used to execute condemned Nazis under United States jurisdiction after the Nuremberg Trials, including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

Prior to 1892, the drop was in the range of 4–10 ft (1.2–3.0 m), depending on the weight of the body, and was calculated to deliver an energy of 1,260 foot-pounds force (1,710 J), which fractured the neck at either the 2nd and 3rd or 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae.

This force resulted in some decapitations, such as the infamous case of Black Jack Ketchum in New Mexico Territory in 1901, owing to a significant weight gain while in custody not having been factored into the drop calculations.

The decapitation of Eva Dugan during a botched hanging in 1930 led the state of Arizona to switch to the gas chamber as its primary execution method, on the grounds that it was believed more humane.

[15] Nazis executed under British jurisdiction, including Josef Kramer, Fritz Klein, Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath, were hanged by Albert Pierrepoint using the variable-drop method devised by Marwood.

When a suicidal hanging involves partial suspension the deceased is found to have both feet touching the ground, e.g., they are kneeling, crouching or standing.

[24] In Northern Europe, it is widely speculated that the Iron Age bog bodies, many of which show signs of having been hanged, were examples of human sacrifice to the gods.

[citation needed] Capital punishment was a part of the legal system of Australia from the establishment of New South Wales as a British penal colony, until 1985, by which time all Australian states and territories had abolished the death penalty.

[30] During the 19th century, crimes that could carry a death sentence included burglary, sheep theft, forgery, sexual assaults, murder and manslaughter.

[37][not specific enough to verify] To this day, hanging remains the standard method of capital punishment in Egypt, which executes more people each year than any other African country.

[38] The prime minister of Hungary, during the 1956 Revolution, Imre Nagy, was secretly tried, executed by hanging, and buried unceremoniously by the new Soviet-backed Hungarian government, in 1958.

It is legal for murder, rape, and drug trafficking unless the criminal pays diyya to the victim's family, thus attaining their forgiveness (see Sharia).

[61] On 26 October 2010, Saddam's top minister Tariq Aziz was sentenced to hang for persecuting the members of rival Shi'a political parties.

[63] The Iraqi High Tribunal had sentenced Saddam's half-brothers to death on 11 March 2009 for their roles in the executions of 42 traders who were accused of manipulating food prices.

][66][self-published source] On 27 February 2004, the mastermind of the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Shoko Asahara, was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.

Long-drop hanging is the method of carrying out judicial capital punishment on civilians in Japan, as in the cases of Norio Nagayama,[67] Mamoru Takuma,[68] and Tsutomu Miyazaki.

[70] Sajida al-Rishawi, the "4th bomber" of the 2005 Amman bombings, was executed by hanging alongside Ziad al-Karbouly on 4 February 2015, while she was in the process of appealing her sentence for terrorism offences, in retribution for the immolation of Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh.

[74] On 16 February 1979, seven men convicted of the ritual killing of the popular Kru traditional singer Moses Tweh were publicly hanged at dawn in Harper.

[75][76] Hanging is the traditional method of capital punishment in Malaysia and has been used to execute people convicted of murder, drug trafficking and waging war against the government.

[96] On 7 July 1865, four people involved in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln—Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt—were hanged at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.

Hanging was the preferred method of execution for capital murder cases in Iowa until 1965, when the death penalty was abolished and replaced with life imprisonment without parole.

This was the case in the 1996 execution of Billy Bailey, the most recent hanging in American history; since then, no Delaware prisoner fit the category, and the state's gallows were later dismantled.

Esther Cohen writes:[106] The inverted hanging with the accompaniment of two dogs, originally reserved for traitors, was identified from the fourteenth century as the "Jewish execution", being practised in the later Middle Ages in both northern and Mediterranean Europe.

[118] As late as in 1699 in Celle, the courts were sufficiently horrified at how the Jewish leader of a robber gang (condemned to be hanged in the normal manner) declared blasphemies against Christianity, that they made a ruling on the post mortem treatment of Jonas Meyer.

[119] Guido Kisch writes that the first instance he knows where a person in Germany was hanged up by his feet between two dogs until he died occurred about 1048, some 250 years earlier than the first attested Jewish case.

The latter was still alive after two days when a certain German jester called Leather-Bag [Follis], hoping to please the emperor, tied a large stone to his neck and shamefully put him to deathA couple of centuries earlier, in France in 991, a viscount Walter nominally owing his allegiance to the French King Hugh Capet chose, on instigation of his wife, to join the rebellion under Odo I, Count of Blois.

[124] The German physician Gottlob Schober (1670–1739),[125] who worked in Russia from 1712, notes that a person could hang from the ribs for about three days prior to expiring, his primary pain being that of extreme thirst.

John Gabriel Stedman stayed in South America from 1772 to 1777 and described the method as told by a witness:[127] "Not long ago," (continued he) "I saw a black man suspended alive from a gallows by the ribs, between which, with a knife, was first made an incision, and then clinched an iron hook with a chain: in this manner he kept alive three days, hanging with his head and feet downwards, and catching with his tongue the drops of water (it being in the rainy season) that were flowing down his bloated breast.