The retired executioner may be left to fight his own battles as regards his aptitude of putting people out of the world.
Those who know him best are perfectly well aware that he is not likely to trouble himself about what people say; but the medical officer of Newgate—we are not aware to what particular one Professor Houghton refers—is doubtless aware that convulsive muscular action may be prolonged for some minutes after the suspended culprit has ceased to experience any sensations.
Professor Houghton tells us that the “old system of taking the convict’s life by suffocation is inhumanely painful, and necessarily prolonged, and revolting to the spectators whose duty it is to be present;” that the object of an effective execution by suspension should be the immediate rupture of the spinal column through the fall, and that the use of the long drop, which by habit has become known as the Irish method, is not only much preferable from a humanitarian point of view, but is the only method by which the desired object can be effectively attained.
It may be as well to hint to the professor that, to judge from an illuminated Anglo-Saxon manuscript in the “Harleian Miscellany,” the severing of the cervical vertebræ occupied the attention of our ancestors centuries ago.
Every executioner, from Derrick to Brandon and from Brandon to Jack Ketch, has done his best to break the criminal’s neck, either by sitting astride his shoulders as the culprit was swung, or by pulling his legs from beneath.
As regards the long drop, a few years since the Irish method was but too painfully manifested at Dublin by the fact of a criminal who was given too long a rope and too sharp a fall so that his head was completely severed from his body.
Suffocation was never “systematic” in cases of hanging in this country, and the custom is immemorial of adjusting the knot of the rope under the sufferer’s left ear, in order that death might be instantaneous.
Professor Haughton thinks that Marwood has done wonders by placing the knot under the criminal’s chin, but a Spanish executioner could very much improve on Marwood’s method by exhibiting the capacity of that compact and efficient machine for rupturing the spinal column, called the “garotte.”