Britain reconsiders hanging criminals, and other weird ways of execution

The last criminal hanging in Britain was in 1964 but according to an opinion poll taken after the recent riots 65 percent of Brits are in favor of bringing it back.

“I want hanging, or some form of execution, brought back, for criminals who kill police officers in pursuit of their crimes and terrorists who kill in pursuit of their political aims,” said Brian Binley, a British MP. Although his words seem extreme, it was just 200 years ago that England executed men convicted of treason by hanging drawing and quartering. And although the US is criticized as the only first world nation that still enables execution, historically cruel and unusual forms of execution were common across the world.

SUICIDE MACHINES AND OTHER DELIVERANCE CONTRAPTIONS

Hanging drawing and quartering was one of the most brutal old ways of execution. The criminal was tied to a wood frame, dragged behind a horse to the place they were to be killed, put in a noose and hung until they were almost dead. Then they were laid out upon a table, disemboweled and castrated. The criminal was still alive at this point and their entrails were burnt right in front of their eyes. They were then beheaded and their body cut into quarters. Females convicted of treason were burnt at the stake. Sticks and straw were piled up to the level of the calves, then lit. First the legs would burn, then the hands, torso, forearms, breasts, upper chest and face. Usually victims did not die until the head caught fire.

In China, a form of execution known as ling chi was practiced until the early twentieth century. The criminal was tied to a wooden frame set in a public space and flesh was then methodically removed by slicing it off with a knife. Usually, the arms, legs and breasts were cut. Then the victim was beheaded and stabbed in the heart. The practice, known also as slow slicing, lingering death or death by a thousand cuts was reserved for especially severe crimes, such as treason or killing one’s parents. Not only did the punishment serve to publicly humiliate the criminal and provide them with a slow painful death, it even served to punish them in the afterlife. The Confucian principle of filial piety looks down upon the altering of one’s body, thus a victim of ling chi would not be whole in the afterlife.

CHINESE FUNERAL CUSTOMS

One of the cruelest and most creative means of execution ever developed has to be the brazen bull, common in Ancient Greece. It was a giant hollow brass bull with a door on the side just large enough for a man to enter. Once locked inside the victim would be set on fire. In the head were a series of tubes and stops designed to amplify his screams and make them sound like the roar of a bull. The device was conceived by a 6th century brass worker named Perilaus of Athens and offered to Phalaris, Tyrant of Agrigentum, as a gift. Upon giving the gift Perilaus told Phalaris that the victim’s screams “will come to you through the pipes as the tenderest, most pathetic, most melodious of bellowings”. This so disgusted Phalaris that he tricked Perilaus into entering the bull, deciding that the invention’s creator would be its first victim. “I loathed the thought of such ingenious cruelty, and resolved to punish the artificer in kind,” stated Phalaris. “When he was inside I closed the aperture, and ordered a fire to be kindled. ‘Receive,’ I cried, ‘the due reward of your wondrous art: let the music-master be the first to play.’”

And the list goes on. The breaking wheel was a medieval device in which a criminal was stretched between the spokes of a cart wheel; as it spun, a heavy metal bar delivered furious blows to the body. Flaying, a very ancient form of execution, involved removing the skin from the body with a sharp knife. Necklacing, practiced in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s and 1990s, involved placing a rubber tire filled with gasoline over the arms and chest of the victim then setting it on fire. Scaphism, an Ancient Persian execution method, involved strapping a person across a rowboat then forcing them to ingest milk and honey until they developed severe diarrhea. Honey was then rubbed over the body to attract insects and the boat was left to float on a stagnant pond in the sun.

“The defenseless individual’s feces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed (and increasingly gangrenous) flesh,” reads a website devoted to cruel forms of execution. “Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock.”