Interesting Guardian article by Marc Abrahams -http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jul/21/improbable-research - ’What would be better: hanging or stoning?’ – discussing research by Harold Hillman. Links well with the staggering and shocking audio tapes of execution by electric chair in Georgia – http://soundportraits.org/on-air/execution_tapes/botched_execution.php. Compare also with Elie Wiesel and George Orwell’s descriptions of Hangings:
Hanging (1): George Orwell, ‘A Hanging’:
The essay was written in 1931 when he was an officer in Burma. This was a British judicial process. How does Orwell feel about the killing? Does he think it is justifiable to kill as a punishment? What reason does he give for his reaction?
‘…One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
…‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.’…
… It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. ‘Chalo!’ he shouted almost fiercely. There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone. The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. ‘He’s all right,’ said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.
…Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. ‘Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always so —oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!’
‘Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,’ said the superintendent…. (ORWELL, G. (1965). Decline of the English Murder and other essays. Harmondsworth. Penguin Books, pp14-19.
Hanging(2) – Elie Wiesel – Night: – Who is imposing the punishment? On what grounds are they doing it? What is their stated purpose of what they are doing?
A Week later, on the way back from work, we noticed in the centre of the camp, at the assembly place, a black gallows.
We were told that soup would not be distributed until after roll call. This took longer than usual. The orders were given in a sharper manner than on other days, and in the air there were strange undertones.
“Bare your heads”, yelled the head of the camp, suddenly.
Tne thousand caps were simultaneously removed.
“Cover your heads.”
Ten thousand caps went back onto their skulls as quick as lightning.
The gate to the camp opened. An SS section appeared and surrounded us: one at every three paces. On the lookout towers the machine guns were trained on the assembly place.
“They fear trouble” whispered Juliek.
Two SS men had gone to the cells. They came back with the condemned man between them. He was a youth from Warsaw. He had three years of concentration camp life behind him. He was a strong, well-built boy, a giant in comparison to me.
His back to the gallows, his face turned toward his judge, who was the head of the camp, the boy was pale, but seemed more moved than afraid. His manacled hands did not tremble. His eyes gazed coldly at the hundreds of SS guards, the thousands of prisoners who surrounded him.
The head of the camp begain to read his verdict, hammering out every phrase.
“ In the name of Himmler…prisoner Number….stole during the alert…According to the law….paragraph….Prisoner Number…is condemned to death. May this be a warning and an example to all prisoners.”
No one moved.
I could hear my heart beating. The thousands who had died daily at Auschwitz and at Birkenau in the crematory ovens no longer troubled me. But this one, leaning against the gallows – he overwhelmed me.
Do you think this ceremony’ll be over soon? I’m hungry” whispered Juliek.
At a sign from the head of the camp, the Lagerkapo advanced toward the condemned man. Two prisoners helped him in his task – for two plates of soup.
The Kapo wanted to bandage the victim’s eyes, but he refused.
After a long moment of waiting, the executioner put the rope round his neck. He was on the point of motioning to his assistants to draw the chair away from the prisoner’s feet, when the latter cried in a calm strong voice:
“Long live liberty! A curse upon Germany! A curse…! A cur_”
The executioners had completed their task.
A command cleft the air like a sword.
“Bare your heads.”
Ten thousand prisoners paid their last respects.
“Cover your heads!”
Then the whole camp, block after block, had to march past the hanged man and stare at the dimmed eyes, the lolling tongue of death. The Kapos and heads of each block forced everyone to look him full in the face…” (Wiesel, E (1958). Night. New York. Avon Books, pp73-4)
In January 1917 Wilfred Owen described four days in the front line in a famous letter to his mother that is seen as the source for ‘Sentry’. The letter is reproduced in the Digital Poetry Archive and is full of astonishing material – 