“We have work for you.” The voice on the other end of the phone wire sounds monotonous and indifferent. The man to whom the call is addressed knows immediately what it is about. He will have to leave, which will not be difficult, as the company car will be waiting for him near his apartment. The only important thing is that none of the neighbours sees him when he enters it. His name and address must remain anonymous for security reasons, as he is an official executioner. He was chosen for this casual job after applying for an advert in the newspaper and has now been paid $500 in cash each time for some time. Even the prison warden does not know his name. All he has in his hand is a telephone number and a recognisable password.
The car is slowly approaching the penitentiary. The robber ties a black hood with eye holes over his head, so that no one can recognise him when he enters the building. He is escorted by officials to a steel door behind which is the execution room, divided in two by a partition wall. There are several windows and doors. In the first room, there is a row of wooden chairs for the twelve official witnesses to the execution. In the second is a dark brown wooden chair with wide leather straps on the arm and leg rests. Two telephones are mounted on the wall.
Preparations for the execution shall be carried out in strict accordance with the execution order of the applicable conviction. The process started four weeks before the execution, when the execution order was read to the condemned man. He was then transferred to one of the death cells. He has been banned from visiting his relatives and friends, so that now only his lawyers have access to him. Four days before his execution, he was stripped of all his possessions. He had to decide for himself the type of funeral and appoint the successors to his property. They also took his allowance for the white shirt and black trousers he would wear on the day of his execution.
On the penultimate and last day before the execution, the electric generator and other equipment of the electric chair were checked and on the last day an ammonia solution was prepared to improve the conductivity of electricity. This will be used to water the sponge that will be attached to the condemned man’s head.
On the day of the execution, the condemned man was received by his relatives at 1 a.m., followed by a meal at 4.30 a.m., and his head and right leg were shaved half an hour later. He was then dressed in a suit and his head was smeared with jelly to prevent burns.
At 7am, he was escorted to the execution room and immediately tied to an electric chair. The electrode was attached to his right ankle and a cap with electrical connections was tied to his head. The head was tied firmly to the back of the chair and the face was grasped. As required by the rules, one telephone number in the execution room was left unattended in case the Governor decided to suspend the death penalty.
The masked executioner sat in the booth behind the electric chair, lever in hand, and switched on the electricity when the time came. It is difficult to imagine what the convict was going through when the electric current was released, and the mystery that no one wants to know is somewhat illuminated by the accounts of the convicts who survived the nightmare.
“My mouth filled with what could have been cold hazelnut butter. I felt a burning pain in my head and leg and began to strain the leather straps with all my might. Little blue, pink and green dots appeared,” said a young man who survived his first session in the electric chair but not his second a year later.
One story is about a woman whose body was electrocuted in an arc, but she did not lose consciousness. The thief tried again, and then again, and then a third time, but the woman still did not lose consciousness. The robber continuously passed 2000 volts through the woman’s body until the prison governor stopped the torture. The convict was taken back to her cell and the process was repeated an hour later. She died in endless agony only a few minutes later. These events are, of course, a counterbalance to the claims that the electric chair is the surest, quickest and least painful way to die.
Razor-sharp blade
In fact, the most modern instruments of capital punishment date back to the French Revolution, and the guillotine is one of its products. One of the first measures taken by the Constituent Assembly in August 1789 was the proclamation of human and civil rights. Revolutionary thinking could not avoid a new criminal law to protect citizens from the arbitrariness of the courts.
The death penalty was also mentioned. The Parisian physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin therefore laid out his six-point proposal in October and then again in December 1789, the gist of which was that beheadings should be carried out, without exception, by a simple mechanical device. The corpse must be handed over to the family, a normal burial must be permitted and the manner of death must not be mentioned in any way in the register of the deceased.
In his second speech to Parliament, Guillotin also spoke about the mechanism to be used to carry out beheadings. “The mechanism works like a flash, the head falls, blood spurts and the man is gone.” Reactions to the proposal have been mixed, with one commentator writing that both the convicts and the executioners will benefit from this ingenious proposal. The latter complained at the time about the difficulty they had in beheading with the axe or the sword.
The convicts were usually restless, and it was difficult to get them to kneel. It also happened that a sword broke during the beheading, and in any case it had to be sharpened well. But it was three years before it was decided that beheadings should be carried out by a mechanical device. The French National Assembly then authorised the Secretary of the Ranoceliers to draw up a plan for the killing apparatus. Each French department was to receive one example, the price of which was also fixed by law: 900 livres.
A prototype was first tested in mid-April 1792. There was no shortage of corpses at the Bicetre Penitentiary Hospital, the attempt to behead three corpses went satisfactorily and on 25 April 1792 the guillotine had its “premiere”. On that day, Nicholas Pelletier, who had been sentenced to death for robbery at gunpoint, was beheaded in the Place de Greve. The unfortunate man had to wait several months before his death, as the guillotine had not yet been completed.
The new device has met the expectations of those who conceived it, as well as the expectations of the large crowds of spectators. The guillotine was heralded as a revolutionary device for capital punishment, even though it was in fact nothing new. In fact, a similar device had been used in France in the first half of the 16th century, and in 1632 it was used to execute Marshal Henry de Montmorency, the leader of a conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu, in Toulouse. It was also known to the Irish and used as early as April 1307. Importantly, the guillotine eradicated class distinctions in capital punishment. Until then, the common people were still hanged and the nobles beheaded.
The guillotine, which was not used very often in the beginning, soon became a means of mass execution during the revolutionary terror. Thus, on 21 January 1793, the head of the former King Louis XVI fell, followed by that of his wife Marie Antoinette on 16 October of the same year, Dantone and Robespierre in April 1894 and, later, Saint-Just, his close associate.
The official announcement was that 33 heads could be cut off in one hour with one guillotine and the same rake. But mass executions also caused problems. Dogs gathered around the killing site and licked up the blood. In some places, residents complained of a terrible stench emanating from the pits where the blood was collected. Soon, one guillotine was no longer enough for mass executions, and a model with four blades working simultaneously was developed.
Underneath the guillotine was a door through which the bodies fell onto the mortuary carts parked below. Ever since the guillotine was used, doctors have wondered what happens to a human head at such a moment. Whether it still feels, sees and hears, or whether it is engulfed in eternal darkness. The answer to this question was given in 1776 by the Parisian doctor Pierre Gaultier. “The severed head still feels and thinks for a few moments,” he said.
He was referring to the execution of Charlotte Corday, who was beheaded in 1793 for stabbing one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Jean Paul Marat. Eyewitnesses said that her face had taken on a strange expression of indignation and her cheeks were flushed. This may, of course, be a figment of the imagination of excited onlookers, but many similar stories of moving lips, gnashing teeth of decapitated persons and eyes that opened when the executed was called by name could be heard during this period.
The guillotine’s blade is actually derived from the blade of the axe, and it was the axe that the Romans used for thousands of years to carry out capital punishment. Why the axe? It has always symbolised power. High-ranking Roman officials always wore butare connected by leather straps, with an axe in the centre as a sign of power. Only Roman citizens and free non-Romans were beheaded, while slaves were always crucified.
Since the days of the Empire, the sword has been the preferred method of execution. In the first centuries AD, the sword almost completely replaced the axe, and in 529 the Emperor Justinian banned the use of the axe altogether. In the early days of Germanic beheadings, the helebard and the club were known. The condemned had to lay his head on a wooden log, the helebard was placed on his neck and a heavy club was struck on it.
In 1562, when France was at war with Spain, Count De Cinq-Mars was executed for conspiracy. He calmly put his head on the soapbox and awaited the blow. But the executioner was clumsy and only wounded him. The condemned man groaned in a flood of blood and tried to rise, but he could not do it any longer. The executioner walked up to him, grabbed him by the hair and cut off his head with a butcher’s knife.
In England, where hanging was the legal method of execution, the axe was used only for nobles and kings. Thus, on 30 January 1649, King Charles I stood before the executioner, who, at a signal from the executioner, severed his head and showed it to the assembled crowd, saying: “This is the head of a traitor.”
Charles I was not the only Stuart to go to the gallows. Mary Stuart was deposed as Queen of Scots in 1567 and fled to England, where she was interned by Queen Elizabeth. During her internment, she hatched a plot to depose Elizabeth. After 18 years of captivity, she was sentenced to death at the age of 43. In February 1587, blindfolded, she calmly stretched out her neck and awaited the sword blow, as was the custom in France. Instead, the executioner met her head with a short-handled axe, the kind used to chop firewood.
But the executioner was clumsy, and the axe struck the ground. The second blow hit the neck, but the head was still not separated from the body, so he used the axe as a knife, cut off the head and grabbed it by the hair to show it to the onlookers. But all that was left in his hand was the Queen’s wig.
But the sword was losing the battle in the battle with the axe. It took much more skill for the thief to use it, and it was difficult to correct bad blows. Soon after 1800, the guillotine became the only means of capital punishment in some German countries, although many Germans could not accept that it was the French Revolution that had given them this mechanical device.
But the guillotine has changed little since its beginnings. At the time of the French Revolution, the blade was still convex, but soon afterwards, it became concave. King Louis XVI of France was not satisfied with this either, and finally opted for a triangular oblique shape. The guillotine continued to be used for many decades, although it was increasingly replaced by death by firing squad. In 1934, Roland Freisler, later the infamous judge of the Nazi “People’s Tribunal”, declared that beheading with an axe was the most appropriate form of execution for Germany.
State executioner
By this time, Johann Baptist Reichhart was already a well-trained executioner. He kept careful records of every task he carried out, so that he knew that he had executed 2,948 people during the Nazi regime. In 1943 alone, he recorded 876 executions and executed his last victim on 29 May 1946. The trained butcher from Wichenbach, Bavaria, executed more people than any of his blood-blooded ancestors.
The profession of executioner had been in his family for generations, so the decision to continue his uncle’s work was not a difficult one for the young Reichhart. He received one hundred and fifty gold marks from the Bavarian government for every job he did. Those were still peaceful times and he was not earning enough from his blood work, so he started breeding dogs, working as a dance teacher and selling Catholic books.
He later claimed that the assassination of Hitler in July 1944 had brought him an enormous amount of work. At that time, he had been working at full speed for several years, rounding up 30 convicts a day. He rushed from penitentiary to penitentiary in his car and folding guillotine. With such a busy schedule, he could not always follow the established guillotine procedure. Even as the judicial officer was reading the last sentences of the death sentence, his assistants were already grabbing the victim by the legs, blindfolding him and pushing him under the guillotine blade, which the very next moment was falling down. Then the body was removed, the guillotine was cleaned with a garden sprinkler and it was ready for the second condemned man.
After Hitler’s assassination, Reichhart had to travel to Berlin. One day towards the end of July 1944, he had already carried out so many executions that he had to ask for a short rest, as he was wading through blood almost up to his ankles. He earned well, so well that he bought a house.
In 1945, he was visited by American interrogators. Not because he had done anything wrong, but to ask him to keep doing his job. They learned that he was quite skilled at hanging convicts, having hanged as many as fifty during the war. The gallows on which some of the war criminals ended up in October 1946 were made to his designs and then handed over to the US Army executioner, John C. Wood.
Reichhart was so skilled at his job that the Americans thought of using him as an executioner for the convicts at the Nuremberg Trials. But they changed their minds. But they asked him to introduce the American executioner into the art of “quick death on the gallows”. Later, Reichhart himself carried out the executions and hanged 42 war criminals sentenced to death on the orders of the American army.
When the death sentence was to be carried out, the US military police came looking for him, took him to work in a jeep and brought him back home after the job was done. He usually had a rucksack full of cans, cigarettes, chewing gum and whisky. This was payment for his work and was worth more than real money at the time.
But his Nazi past was fatal for him. In the summer of 1947, he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and later sentenced to two years in a labour camp as part of the denazification process. There, in desperation, he unsuccessfully cut his wrists. In the camp hospital, he was beaten almost to death by his Nazi jailers, who considered him a traitor. He died in 1972, aged 78, impoverished, lonely and nervously ill.
In the post-war years from 1946 to 1949, 34 death sentences for criminal offences were handed down by the courts of the Western Occupation Zone in Berlin. During this period, the executioner Gustav Volpel, who used both the axe and the guillotine in his work, was active both in Berlin and in the Soviet Occupation Zone. During executions, he always wore a green and black mask with a cross on his forehead.
However, in 1948, the authorities of the time refused his services because he was associated with the most dangerous criminal group controlling the black market at the time. In 1949, he was caught and the court sentenced the former executioner to seven years in prison. The guillotine used by Volpel was used only twice more, the last time on 11 May 1949. Twelve days later, the new Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany, which abolished the death penalty, was already in force. The guillotine remained in Berlin’s Moabit Remand Prison, well-oiled, dismantled into several parts and placed in wooden crates.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Albert Pierrepoint, the official executioner of the British Crown, began explaining the execution process to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1949, after two decades in the job.
“Let me describe what happens when a convict has to say goodbye to life. Executing a convict is a precise job. It is important to test the rope. We fill a sack with sand and hang it on the rope overnight, before testing its free fall. The rope should be placed around the neck of the convict, with the knot tucked under the left jaw. This is the only way to ensure that the convict will die within seconds of the neck being opened under his feet. Otherwise, there is a real strangulation with the rope, which can take up to a quarter of an hour.”
What Pierrepoint told the Royal Commission was the English method of capital punishment by hanging, the so-called “long fall” method, which had been used in England since the 1800s. At that time, the executioner was left to decide from what height the condemned man’s body would fall to the depths. The length of the rope had to be in proportion to the condemned person’s weight and build. If the victim did not fall deep enough, he was subject to suffocation, and if he fell too far, he was almost decapitated.
In 1953, the Commission published its report. It concluded that the English way of administering sentences was good and that there were hardly any mistakes. Pierrepoint also wrote his memoirs and in them he proudly described the quality of his work.
In the UK, the death penalty was abolished in 1969, except for particularly serious offences such as high treason. Even in American prisons, the gallows were only used in a very few states a few years ago, and even then the alternatives were poison injection or shooting. The English and American methods of hanging had in common the “long fall” and the hole under the victim’s feet. At San Quentin Penitentiary, however, they had another peculiarity. In a corner of the courtyard there was a small narrow room in which three guards sat. At the sign of the executioner, all three of them simultaneously cut one of the three taut ropes stretched across the table. One of them opened the door under the condemned man’s feet, and only the executioner knew which one was the right one.
The “long drop” procedure was also used after World War II to execute war criminals in Germany. War criminals convicted at the Nuremberg Trials were executed on the night of 16 October 1946. The convicts were given dinner around midnight and the hospital commandant read out the death sentence once more. The execution platoon of the Third American Army then took over the proceedings. The sentences were carried out in the gymnasium, where there were three gallows. The executioner was Sergeant John C. Wood, assisted by an assistant. It took 103 minutes to carry out all ten executions. Some of the hanged men had bloody faces, which the executioner explained by saying that they had probably bitten their tongues. Two military trucks then transported the coffins to Munich, where they were burned in a crematorium.
Hanged, but alive
A very different way of carrying out sentences from the Anglo-American way was known in Austria-Hungary. Its most typical representative of the bloodline was Josef Lang from Vienna. When he was appointed in 1900, he undertook to carry out executions everywhere in the country, with the exception of Bohemia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. His first assignment even took him to Slovenia, near Kranj. There, after only 45 seconds, he was able to announce that the execution had been successful, and the medical officer of the court patted him on the shoulder and said: “Bravo Lang.”
Lang has always followed his usual procedure. The hanging rope was always greased with soap and the end of the rope was hung on a hook at the top of the gallows. On his signal, the assistants pulled the convict to his feet and in a few seconds it was all over. During his task, Lang was without exception wearing a saloon gown, a cylinder on his head and gloves on his hands, which he threw under the gallows after the execution had been carried out. His method was the same as that used in England before the “long fall”. Sometimes he even had to climb onto his victim’s back, which was considered a bad hanging.
In the days of the double monarchy, when executioners were still in operation, the law in force in 1853 required that a hanged man be hanged from the gallows all day long. Later, it was prescribed that a doctor should determine when the victim should be taken down from the gallows. The unpleasant consequences of premature removal from the gallows were demonstrated in 1880 by a case in Hungary which caused widespread uproar. The murderer Takasco was hanged at 8 a.m. and his body was taken down after ten minutes and taken for an autopsy. He was revived half an hour later and was partially conscious. He died the next day of pulmonary oedema.
Between 1903 and 1914, Lang had little to do, as Emperor Franz Joseph confirmed only two death sentences. It was not until World War I that he found full employment. After the war, the double Danubian monarchy became the Republic of Austria, where the death penalty was still handed down only by the regular courts, no longer by the summary courts.
In 1936, the old executioner Lang committed suicide. Impoverished and without a break of steam, he hanged himself in his Vienna apartment.
The French executioners were executed in a similar way to Lang. Here, the condemned man had to climb a ladder with a noose around his neck and his hands were tied on his back. The executioner pushed him off the ladder with his knee, then climbed on his bound hands like a stepladder, increasing the weight on the noose. Incidentally, revival of the already shackled man was not all that uncommon. In 1650, a woman named Anne Green was hanged in England. Half an hour later, she was laid in her coffin and found still breathing. She came to, survived and later had several more children. In Turin, in 1853, a hanged man was observed to start coughing while being transported to the cemetery. In Berlin, a hanged man woke up in the middle of the 18th century and continued to show himself for money at fairs for many years afterwards.
In 1927, the British Medical Journal reported an incident witnessed by an English doctor in the colonies. The death sentences of four natives were carried out in pairs. After they were hanged, the doctor pronounced them dead. But even after they had been hanging from the gallows for ten minutes, a heartbeat could be felt. Then the beating stopped and they were put on stretchers. One of the presumed dead started coughing and gasping for air. The executioner made up his mind quickly and had him hanged on the gallows again a quarter of an hour later. To prevent such cases, the English decided that the corpse should hang from the gallows for an hour before being taken down.
Hanging as a punishment is ancient, but it seems that it was originally intended only as an additional punishment or reprimand for a convict who had already been executed in some other way. It was only towards the end of the Middle Ages that hanging began to be used as a means of carrying out the death sentence. In earlier times, it was characterised by the rule that the hanged person should not be buried. He had to hang from the gallows until his body had completely decomposed. Only then did the executioner’s assistants bury him at the place of execution.
Death on the gallows has always been considered dishonourable, and the removal of corpses from the gallows a violation of the death penalty. In the Middle Ages, it was the most common punishment for thieves, so anyone who ended up on the gallows was presumed to have been a thief. Such deaths were usually reserved for male thieves, while women often got away with having the judge impose a heavy fine on their family. In 1619, a woman was hanged, but before she was executed, she was put in men’s trousers.
There were often two ladders at the morgue. The executioner climbed the first one and placed the rope on the crossbar, while the condemned man climbed the second. In other cases, the condemned man was pulled onto the rack with a rope and then lowered into the depths. It also happened that a convict was brought under the gallows on a cart, a rope was put around his neck and the cart was pushed forward. In particularly cruel executions, the condemned man was dragged by rope to a crossbeam and allowed to cling to it, holding on until he ran out of strength and fell into the depths.
The Spanish method of execution by neck squeezing, known as the garota, also bears a strong resemblance to the gallows. The construction of a garotte is relatively simple. There is a seat attached to a stake and an iron ring at neck level. The condemned person is made to sit down, then tied down and a ring is placed around his neck, which is then screwed in place with a special screw behind the stake until the victim suffocates.
The garotte has been the main means of execution in Spain since the 18th century. It was also used in Portugal, Cuba, Puerto Rico and South America. In the Americas, the Spanish burned captured Indian chiefs, but sometimes they showed mercy and executed them with the garotte. The last Inca ruler, Atahualpa, therefore decided in 1553 to be baptised first, before being executed by garotte.
In the Philippines, the garotte was still used in 1903, when four murderers were executed. Believe it or not, the Spanish were still using it in the 1970s to execute conspirators against the Franco dictatorship. The last time it was used was in 1974, when the student Salvador Puig Anticho was executed.
Strangulation was also a specific type of execution by cutting off the airway. Unlike death on the gallows, it was not public. In the Middle Ages, a person condemned to death by burning at the stake was sometimes shown special mercy by being strangled inconspicuously by the executioner with a thin thread before the stake was lit.
Equally secret was the order for suicide by strangulation, which was common among the upper classes in Turkey, Iran and China. There, it was the duty of the eunuchs to hand over to their master a silk hemp brought to them by a special messenger of the Turkish Sultan. It was an unequivocal requirement that the condemned must take his own life with the hemp or leave the job to his servants.
Electricity helps
We have already spoken about the events surrounding the execution in the electric chair. Much has been written about it, but we know very little about how it came about. It goes back to the 19th century to the idea of electrocution. In Germany, it remained an idea, but practical Americans were already thinking of a technical solution to the problem. For example, someone in New York had already applied for a patent for an electric chair, but it had not attracted much attention.
But America has been the country where most of the criticism has been about death by hanging. There have been several proposals for a different method of execution, and some of them have been quite fantastic. The first experiments with dogs, cattle and horses were carried out in the laboratory of the versatile inventor Edison. On the basis of these results, a special commission submitted a proposal to the New York State Legislature in June 1888 to use electric current in executions. It was adopted by 87 votes to eight.
The decision was taken in haste, as neither physicists nor doctors knew exactly what conditions had to be met. Despite these concerns, on 6 August 1890, the first execution by the modern method was carried out at Auburn Hospital in New York. The killer, William Kemmler, died at 6.49 a.m. in front of 24 witnesses, including 14 doctors. Death occurred after just 17 seconds. Because of the post-mortem convulsions, the hospital management decided to electrocute him twice more.
The official report claimed that death was immediate and painless, although some witnesses claimed otherwise. The first time it took three jolts of electricity, the second time it took eight minutes and the third time several unpleasant parallel phenomena were observed. After the first jolt, an erection of the penis was observed, with semen spurting out. When the electric current was interrupted for the second time, the victim began to leak gastric gases. Something else was wrong with the current; instead of 1000 volts, the voltage was only 700 volts.
Even though technical improvements were made, sometimes strange things happened afterwards. There have been people who have been executed and revived in the autopsy room. The New York executioner Robert Elliot once recounted: “Fred’s heart was in and he was alive. There was only one thing we could do. We put him back in the chair and kept the current flowing until he died.”
Some of the executions have provoked public reprimands from many people. Such was the case of the Italian emigrants in America, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They were convicted of a robbery attack on a money transport in which two of the transport’s attendants lost their lives. Despite claiming their innocence, they sat in the electric chair in Boston in 1927. On the day of their execution, 500 police officers had to calm a crowd of protesters outside the prison.
After 1914, New York State carried out all executions only in the electric chair, at the old Sing Sing prison. The execution room measured 60 m2 and had no windows. There were four benches in the corner for the 12 official witnesses and the relatives of the condemned. This was also the place where Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were accused of having betrayed the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, died in June 1953. The last time electricity was switched on in Sing Sing was in 1963. Half a century after New York, the electric chair was used in 22 US states, and it was not until the 1980s that needle-stick executions became more widespread.
However, despite all efforts, even modern technology has not always been able to ensure a smooth execution. In 1938, a condemned man had to watch for three hours as an electrician struggled to fix a fault in the electric chair. In the end, he had to admit defeat and the execution was postponed for four days. In 1983, John Evans was executed in Alabama. Within 14 minutes, his body was electrocuted three times, each time with a voltage of 1900 volts. The first time the electrode burned out, the second time the doctors were not sure whether Evans was dead, and only the third time they were able to determine that he had died.
But that was nothing compared to the execution in Indiana, which lasted 17 minutes and had to be switched on five times, even though the electric chair worked perfectly. The electric chair at Starke State Penitentiary in Florida has been in operation since 1924. Despite regular maintenance, there are occasional inconveniences, but Old Sparky, as the inmates call him, is still in use. By 1993, 224 convicts had died there.
Execution by firing squad is the most common form of capital punishment today, with laws in as many as 80 countries providing for it. Of course, the development of suitable firearms has made it possible to execute people by firing squad. The fifteenth century brought the first usable firearm – the arquebuse. This was a seven-kilogram weapon with a calibre of 20 mm and lead bullets. Because of the weight, a device resembling a forked prop was used to fire it.
It was the arquebus that gave the death penalty by firing squad its first name. This method of execution was called arquebushing, and the name persisted into the 16th century, when the arquebuse was replaced by the musket. British colonial officials used cannons instead of guns for executions during the 1857-1859 uprising of their colonial auxiliaries in India. The leaders of the uprising were tied in front of the cannons and blown up in front of the assembled crowd. The same method was used in Persia and Afghanistan.
In previous centuries, civilians rarely ended up in front of guns, as this type of execution was considered honourable. Of course, there have been awkwardnesses here too. Firearms were very inaccurate at the time and therefore required several repetitions. Historians tell of an execution in Kassel, Germany, where fifty inaccurate shots hit the unfortunate victim. The condemned man’s life was only ended by a firing line placed directly in front of the condemned man.
Women rarely stood in front of the firing line. One of the most famous executions took place on 15 October 1917, when Mata Hari, accused of spying for Germany, was shot dead in a forest near Paris after being convicted by a military court.
In the US military, the process of execution by court-martial is very strict. A black hood is tied over the condemned person’s head, which is not allowed to let in light. The firing squad, which is set up in two rows 20 metres from the condemned man, is commanded by a non-commissioned officer. One of the rifles is always loaded with manoeuvre ammunition, the others with live ammunition.
During World War II, US military courts handed down 2,864 convictions for desertion. These were mostly prison sentences of up to 20 years, and 49 death sentences were confirmed, but only one was carried out. Private Edward Slowik was shot dead in January 1945 at St. Marie aux Mines in the Vosges Mountains. Incidentally, 101 American soldiers were executed for various other crimes in World War II.
As many as 12 snipers were scheduled to shoot Slowik. After examining his body, the military doctor found that not a single bullet had hit his heart. According to military regulations, it was the heart that had to be targeted. The bullets were scattered from the shoulders to the arms and chest. Although there was no deliberate evasion, as all 12 bullets hit, the shooters were more than obviously overcome by severe nervousness.
Executions by firing squad have a long tradition in America, with the first reported in 1608, when America was still an English colony. Utah law even provided that the condemned person could choose between being shot, hanged or beheaded. Today, execution is reduced to shooting.
After World War II, there were many death sentences in Europe for collaboration with the enemy. Vidkun Quisling was shot in Norway in October 1945, Pierre Laval, who led the Vichy regime, was shot in France the same month, and dictator Ion Antonescu was shot in Romania in June 1946.
In the Soviet Union, the death penalty has existed since 1922. It has always been carried out by firing squad. At the height of the political purges of 1937 and 1938, death sentences were particularly common, and the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, for example, informed his branch in the town of Frunze: “You are obliged to destroy 10,000 enemies of the people. Report by telegraph.”
The executioners did not use a special procedure, but usually shot in the nape of the neck. In Lubyanka, an eight-storey building in the centre of Moscow, there was the so-called “inner prison”, where the execution rooms were two by three metres and had black painted walls.
The execution of Mdivani, the leading party secretary in the Caucasus, was different. The six convicts were taken from Tbilisi by car. They stopped in front of a freshly dug pit, next to which stood two trucks loaded with lime and water. Mdivani turned to the executioner and said, “Listen, shoot me last.” Asked why, Mdivani replied, “I want to encourage my comrades.”
The executioner drew his revolver and shot the first one, then turned to the second. When he had shot all six, a groan came from the cave. Mdivani was still alive and his hands were twitching slightly. The executioner loaded his gun and indeed shot him last.
The mass shooting of 45 convicts in September 1983 in a dried-up riverbed outside Zhengzhou, China, was particularly horrific. The convicts were led to a row of wooden stakes driven into the ground. The police fired at point-blank range and then proceeded to mercy shoot those who still showed signs of life. According to Amnesty International, a crowd of curious onlookers witnessed the shooting and broke through the ring that the police had set up around those who had been shot after the shooting was over. The curious onlookers, horrified, stopped only when they saw the carnage, but what when there was a crowd behind them pushing them forward. They began to fall into the dry riverbed and onto those who had been shot. Panic ensued, a policeman pulled out a stake, impaled one of the shot men on it and started pointing it at the crowd, which started to retreat, terrified.
Gas solves all problems
James B. Holohan took over as warden of the notorious San Quentin Penitentiary in 1927. His duties included overseeing the death penalty by hanging, which was the standard method of execution in California at the time. He was not opposed to the death penalty, but was convinced that there was no more gruesome method of execution than hanging. One day he received an invitation from Carson City, Nevada, a state where executions were carried out in a gas chamber. The condemned man lost consciousness at the first breath, and everything went on peacefully thereafter.
He returned home convinced that this was the only way to be executed. By mid-1937, he had tried in vain to persuade the authorities to install a gas chamber at San Quentin. After his retirement, he ran for and was elected to the California House of Representatives, and gradually gathered enough votes to get the Governor of California to sign a law in August 1937 making gas chamber executions the only permitted method of capital punishment.
The following year, San Quentin Penitentiary already had its own gas cell, equipped with a range of gadgets such as pumps, measuring apparatus, funnels, tongs, steel chains, gas masks, soap, towels and so on. The assembly of the gas cell was very complicated, as there were no experts in precision work and the assemblers were prisoners. Of all the prisoners, only one was qualified for such work. His name was Alfred Wells and he was imprisoned for burglary. He was tortured for four days before he installed the necessary pipes and wiring and connected the measuring apparatus. The gas cell was not ready for use until the end of 1938. The instructions for its use were written in 28 pages.
From the first execution in December 1938 until 1967, 196 convicts were executed here, followed by a 25-year hiatus. The gas cell was not used again until April 1992. But the irony of fate is endless. Just four years after the gas chamber became operational, its installer, Alfred Wells, sat in the chair. He was released shortly after the installation, where he shot dead his brother, his wife and his girlfriend. The murder had been long planned because his relatives wanted to prevent his marriage to his half-sister.
Before his execution in December 1942, the warden of the penitentiary asked him, “Al, haven’t you remembered that you will end up here for your crime?” Wells just shook his head and said, “Warden, when Satan gets hold of you, as he got hold of me, remember nothing, nothing at all.”
The gas chamber is no more than 2.7 metres wide and contains two chairs, in case a double execution is necessary. During the execution, it is illuminated, with hospital officials, the prison doctor and official witnesses standing in front of the window. Before the execution, the executioner is given a plastic bag containing 16 ampoules of cyanide, which he attaches under the seat of a chair in the gas chamber. Before the condemned man enters, two containers are filled with distilled water to which sulphuric acid is added. As soon as he is strapped into the chair, a stethoscope is attached to his body, which is connected to a doctor outside the gas cell. This allows the doctor to tell at any moment whether the heart has stopped beating.
A special pump sucks as much air out of the cell as possible to make the gas expand as quickly as possible. When the executioner pulls the lever, the plastic bag containing the ampoules is immersed in sulphuric acid. The chemical reaction of the cyanide with the sulphuric acid produces the deadly prussic acid. The gas paralyses the airways within seconds and death soon follows.
Caryl Chessman, the most famous death row candidate of her time, dies in a San Quentin gas chamber. He was known not only for his 12-year battle with the justice system, but above all for the bestselling book he wrote in prison. The book is entitled Death Row 2455. He was brought there in July 1948, but it was not until May 1960 that he sat in a chair in a gas cell and died within nine minutes.
Towards the end of the 18th century, some jurists remembered that poison was also a suitable means of execution. They considered opium in particular to be suitable for mild executions. In 1887, the American Julius Mont Bleyer was the first to mention execution by injection of morphine. Debates about poison stretched well into the 20th century, with some suggesting that the condemned man should drink the beaker of poison himself. In 1977, Texas decided that the time was right for a change, and that was for “the intravenous injection of a substance that would cause the death of the condemned”. In Oklahoma, however, the legislation was even more specific, prescribing “the continuous intravenous administration of a lethal amount of a very fast-acting barbiturate combined with a chemical paralysing agent until death is determined by a competent physician”.
In such cases, the doctor makes an opening in the defendant’s arm and inserts a catheter. This leads to an adjacent room where there is a rhabdo, which first releases a neutral saline solution and then a poison. In Texas, 54 convicts have been executed in this way since 1982. This can be a problem for convicts who are alcoholics or drug addicts. For the former, it is difficult to determine what dose of poison is sufficient to cause death, and for the latter, it is difficult to find a suitable vein for the catheter. In 1985, for example, doctors in Texas spent 40 minutes searching for a suitable vein in a convict’s arm.
Sometimes, cutting-edge technology comes to the rescue. In some places, computer-controlled automatic poison injection machines have been introduced. The keypad has two buttons that are pressed simultaneously by the two people responsible for carrying out the execution, and the computer decides which button is the right one to press. The display is always available to monitor the different stages of the procedure. Red indicates readiness, yellow the start of the procedure and green the end.
In mid-November 1988, 30 former prisoners gathered in Chicago. All were sentenced to death and imprisoned on death row, but later acquitted on the basis of additional evidence. Most of them spent several years on death row. Since 1976, it has been proven that more than 80 innocent people have been wrongfully executed in the USA. Yet the authorities are preoccupied with what would be a technically even better way to execute them. For the opponents of the death penalty, the result of their struggle is humiliating. Indeed, the increasing number of “humane” executions has meant that the number of executions in some countries is rising, or at least not falling.
