The Gruesome Fate of the Death Penalty!

Be glad we no longer have the death penalty

If you were a criminal in the centuries BC, you really didn’t want to get caught.

They didn’t have electricity, so the electric chair couldn’t be used for your execution.

Nor had they discovered pancuronium bromide or potassium chloride for a lethal injection.

No, instead, you would either be executed by drowning, being beaten to death, being burnt alive, or by being impaled.

As society became supposedly more civilised, additional means of execution included being burnt at the stake, being boiled alive, hanging, and beheading.

Of course, there was also the jackpot in the world of executions, and that was hanging, drawing and quartering.

First, you’d be hung until you were nearly dead.

After that, you would be tied to a table and while alive, your guts and sex organs would be removed, this was the drawing part.

Then, just to make sure you were dead, they would cut off your head, and your body would be hacked into four sections, hence the term “quartered”,

By the 1700s the law had gone a bit nuts, and there were 222 crimes which were punishable by death, including chopping down a tree or robbing a rabbit warren.

As a consequence, during the reign of Henry VIII, two of his wives were included in the 72,000 people he had executed during his reign!

Fortunately, by 1837 the legal system was reformed and the number of crimes punishable by death was reduced to a mere 100.

Yes, only 200 years ago you could still be executed for committing one of a hundred crimes.
Even during Victorian times public executions still took place for such petty crimes as stealing food or a horse, with Sarah Dazley being the last woman to be executed in public before the Prisons act of 1868 banned public executions.

So nice were the Victorians that from 1874 onwards, they decided to look into different ways of making executions less painful and more humane, and many different forms of hanging were tried out! How thoughtful of them...

Remarkably, it took a further hundred years before the death penalty was suspended in England, Scotland and Wales in 1965 for murder, and abolished in 1969, though Northern Ireland had to wait until 1973. Many countries around the world today still execute the death penalty. Excuse the pun!

Curiously, it was not until 1971 that the death penalty was abolished for causing a fire or explosion in a naval dockyard, ship, magazine or warehouse, 1981 for espionage, and 1998 for piracy with violence!

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