In rare cases, intense fear can cause the victim to die of cardiac arrest. Even when the neck is broken, Hillman says, there is still blood containing oxygen in the brain. The brain can still function at some level until that oxygen is used up.
In praxes, this means that facial movements can still occur even after the head has been severed from the body. The head of the Marie Antoinette, the guillotined French queen, famously smiled after being chopped off for precisely this reason, Hillman says. Criminals have been hanged since the Persian Empire first adopted the practice 2, years ago.
The last major advance in the technology of hangings was made in the 19th century, when tables were devised to calculate both the length of rope needed to kill, and the distance of the necessary "drop. According to these so-called "drop tables," the heavier the prisoner, the shorter the distance needed to produce sufficient force to break his neck. Iraqi officials said that the gallows were built in accordance with international standards, but human rights officials disputed that claim.
They were to be hung by the neck until dead , and which postmortems are expected to confirm. Its potential as a deterrent in particular, a popular claim that imagines the state as an imposing executioner, is yet to be demonstrated, especially for crimes against women. That said, the act of hanging itself is gruesome in its right, using a method that dates to ancient Greece and technology to the midth century, although there have been many adjustments.
India itself uses a method called the long-drop. Since then, people have been executed, nearly half of them by the Government of Uttar Pradesh. Until the midth century or so, the short-drop hanging was the most common method. Once the noose was in place, the support would be kicked away and the subsequent short drop would slowly strangle the person. Specifically, the noose would squeeze on the carotid arteries that ferry blood to the brain and press down on the trachea, which brings oxygen to the lungs.
This distance can be anywhere from 5 to 9 feet 1. With the knot of the noose placed at the left side of the subject's neck, under the jaw, the jolt to the neck at the end of the drop is enough to break or dislocate a neck bone called the axis , which in turn should sever the person's spinal cord. In some cases, the hangman jerks up on the rope at the precise moment when the drop is ending in order to facilitate the breakage. The idea of a 'humane hanging" was developed by an Irish mathematician and doctor named Samuel Haughton.
He calculated how far the prisoner would have to fall and then be brought up by a jerk on the rope so they would be killed quickly and relatively painlessly. Haughton published his findings in In , 55 countries still had the death penalty, according to Amnesty International. In the United States, judicial hanging is legal in both Washington state and Delaware, and three prisoners have been hanged since the death penalty was reinstituted in , the last in We'll explain how an "ideal hanging" or a long drop works, and what happens with a "short drop.
During an "ideal long drop," the prisoner's neck breaks and spine severs, blood pressure drops down to nothing in about a second, and the subject loses consciousness. Brain death then takes several minutes to occur, and complete death can take more than 15 or 20 minutes, but the person at the end of the rope most likely can't feel or experience any of it. In a less-than-ideal long drop, if the distance is miscalculated or some other factor misses the mark, the subject will die of decapitation if the drop is too long or of strangulation if the drop is too short or the noose knot isn't in the correct position.
Strangulation can take several minutes and is a far more excruciating experience. The carotid arteries in the neck, which supply blood to the brain , are compressed, and the brain swells so much it ends up plugging the top of the spinal column; the Vagal nerve is pinched , leading to something called the Vagal reflex , which stops the heart ; and the lack of oxygen getting to the lungs due to compression of the trachea eventually causes loss of consciousness due to suffocation.
Death then follows in the same pattern as it does when the neck breaks, with the entire process ending in anywhere from five to 20 minutes.
For the person being executed, the actual experience of the hanging lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes — or at least that's the general belief by forensic scientists. In some countries where executions are carried out by hanging, though, other methods are used.
The same type of death occurs in suspension hanging , in which the subject is jerked into the air instead of being dropped. And in a standard-drop hanging, the subject falls about 5 feet 4.
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