His struggles were terrible to witness, and it was quite four minutes before they ceased, and he could be fairly pronounced to be dead.
He was hung with what is called the short drop—which Calcraft invariably made use of. He declares to this day it is by far the most humane and preferable of the two.
Within the last few weeks we have been favoured with long dissertations upon the various modes of putting criminals to death.
A morning paper has given space in its columns for the insertion of several letters under the heading of “Bungling Executions.”
The gallows is a dreadful alternative to have resort to, but it is one which cannot be safely dispensed with till some other mode of putting criminals to death is substituted.
No doubt the ghastly apparatus of the scaffold, the halter, and the drop is a shocking topic for public discussion, but the controversy, crude and well-nigh grotesque as it is in form, opens a field for inquiry, the consideration of which calls for curious attention.
It so happens that at the present moment there are only three nations in Europe which retain the undeniably clumsy and barbarous custom of putting human beings to death by suspending them to a beam with a rope round the neck.
Those three nations are Great Britain, Russia, and Turkey. France, Italy, Belgium, and Greece employ a highly-perfected guillotine. Spain and Portugal adhere to the swiftly-killing and painless garotte. Germany, in the rare instances in which capital punishment is inflicted, uses the sword.
We share with our estimable ally, the Turk, and with despotic Russia, the honour of strangling malefactors in the good old conservative fashion.
Impalement seems to have been abandoned, the bowstring appears to have fallen into disuse, and the gallows appears to offer an additional advantage in the circumstance that the patient can be hanged first, and decapitated afterwards.