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Hanging is a form of execution or a method for suicide.

Hanging may involve breaking of the neck (cervical fracture, in the case of a "long-drop"), or one or more of the following (in the case of a "short-drop"):

• Closing the airway
• Closing the carotid arteries
• Closing the jugular veins
• Carotid reflex (which reduces heartbeat when the pressure in the carotid arteries is high) causing cardiac arrest

As punishment it has been used throughout history.

In England the short drop method was used until the 19th century, when the long-drop was introduced.

The short-drop could be a protracted affair and was primarily for the entertainment of the watching public, the struggling of the victim giving rise to such terms as "the hangman's hornpipe".

History

Hanging has been used as punishment throughout history; it is known to have been invented and used by the Persian Empire. The typical sentence involving hanging is that the condemned person "be hanged by the neck until dead". A more elaborate sentence, once used for particularly heinous crimes (e.g., high treason in Britain), was for the person to be "hanged, drawn and quartered" – here the victim was saved from asphyxiation in order to endure the further ordeals.

Hanging has historically been the method of execution used for common criminals; in feudal England, for example, peasants were usually hanged for crimes, while the nobility were usually beheaded. Since as a result hanging has become associated with dishonorable execution, the courts in the post-World War II war crimes trials in Germany (the Nuremberg trials) and Japan mandated its use for war criminals rather than execution by firing squad.

As a form of judicial execution in England, hanging is thought to date from the Saxon period, circa AD 400. Records of the names of British hangmen begin with Thomas de Warblynton in the 1360s; complete records extend from the 1500s to the last hangmen, Robert Leslie Stewart and Harry Allen, who conducted the last British executions in 1964.

Early methods of hanging simply involved a hangman's noose on a rope placed around the victim's neck, with the loose end thrown over or tied to a tree branch; the hangman then drew up the criminal, who slowly strangled. An early refinement had the victim climb a ladder or stand in a cart that the hangman then removed. As the number of executions increased, purpose-built gallows, which usually consisted of two posts joined by a crossbeam, replaced trees. Soon virtually every major town and city in Britain had its own gallows.

Although hangmen had introduced the "drop" by the late 1700s, it was initially only a substitute for the ladder or the cart. The first well-known practitioner of "the drop" was William Calcraft, but his successor William Marwood (who was often quoted as saying "Calcraft hanged them, I execute them"), introduced the "long drop". Marwood realised that each person required a different drop, based on the prisoner's weight, which would dislocate the cervical vertebrae resulting in "instantaneous" death.

A process of sometimes grisly experimentation led to the discovery that an energy of 1260 foot pounds (1710 joules) would have the desired effect, so one could calculate the required drop by dividing 1260 by the weight of the victim: a person weighing 112 pounds (50.8 kg) required a drop of 11'4" (3.43 m). Over time, Marwood refined this basic formula to take account of the prisoner's age, stature, and physical condition, especially after some early mistakes when too great a drop resulted in decapitation. Marwood also experimented with the positioning of the knot, and discovered that placing it under the left ear or under the angle of the left jaw would jerk the head backwards at the end of the drop and instantly sever the spinal cord and dislocate the cervical vertebrae. Prison governors and staff who were required, following the abolition of public executions in 1868, to witness executions at close quarters, welcomed the development of swift and "clean" methods of hanging.

As time went by, hanging became more of a science than an art. By the mid-20th century the average time between taking a victim from the cell and death was around fifteen seconds – although on May 8, 1951 Albert Pierrepoint conducted the fastest hanging on record when James Inglis, whom a court had only three weeks earlier convicted and sentenced for the murder of a prostitute, fell through the trap only seven seconds after leaving his cell.

Extra-legal primitive forms of hanging persisted well into the 20th Century in the United States in the form of lynchings, where torture and/or mutilation of the corpse often accompanied the hanging.

Death is caused by severing the spinal cord between C1 and C2, which stops breathing by effectively stopping the diaphragm from working. Forensic experts can tell if hanging is suicide or homicide, as each leaves a distinctive ligature mark. If the hyoid bone is broken, it usually means the person has been murdered. Also, there have been cases of autoerotic asphyxiation leading to death; recently, kids have died from playing the choking game.

Britain

Until 1808 the law in Britain offered the death penalty for some 200 offenses, including:

• Attempting suicide
• Being in the company of gypsies for one month
• Vagrancy for soldiers and sailors
• "Strong evidence of malice" in children aged 7–14 years old

A variety of loopholes in British criminal law, together with judicial leniency, tempered the law's tendency to prescribe hanging for what many would today consider minor offences. First-time offenders could escape a capital sentence for some crimes through the benefit of clergy, and of those criminals actually sentenced to death, many were later pardoned. Only about half the death sentences pronounced at common law in the 18th century were carried out, and by the beginning of the 19th century, growing doubt over the appropriateness of capital punishment led to nearly 90% of British capital sentences being commuted to lesser punishments.

Between 1832 and 1834 Parliament abolished the death penalty for:

• Shoplifting goods worth five shillings (£0.25) or less
• Returning from Transportation
• Letter-stealing
• Sacrilege

In 1861 The Parliament reduced the number of capital crimes to four:

• Murder
• Treason
• Arson in Royal Dockyards
• Piracy with violence

Britain ended public hangings in 1868 and formally abolished the hanging, beheading and quartering of traitors in 1870.

In 1965 Parliament passed the 'Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act' abolishing capital punishment for murder. And with the introduction of the Human Rights Act in 1998, the death penalty was officially abolished for all crimes in both civilian and military cases.

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union, the last persons to be sentenced to death by hanging were Andrey Vlasov and 11 other officers of his army on August 1, 1946.

Iran

One of the hanging execution procedures currently used in Iran does not use a drop, but involves using an automotive telescoping crane to hoist the condemned aloft. This method may have been adapted from yardarm hangings carried out by the Royal Navy.

A recent hanging carried out by this method in Iran was that of a 16 year old girl, Ateqeh Rajabi, who was hanged in August 2004 for sexual misdemeanours. The conduct of her case and her actual execution were very controversial internationally.

The United States

In the United States, other forms of capital punishment, such as the electric chair and more recently lethal injection, have largely replaced hanging.

At present, only Washington and New Hampshire still retain hanging as an option. Laws changed in 1996 that penalties of death must be executed by injection unless the convict chooses hanging, but none has taken place ever since. In New Hampshire if it found "... to be impractical to carry out the punishment of death ..." by lethal injection, then the condemned will be hanged. In Washington, the default method is lethal injection, though the condemned can choose hanging.

Serial killer and child molester Westley Allan Dodd chose it over injection in 1992. (See the book Driven to Kill.) Charles Campbell was another person hanged in the same State on 27 May 1994. The last person hanged in the United States was Billy Bailey, on January 25 1996 in Delaware, and later the same state abolished this practice.

Singapore

Like many Asian countries, Singapore has an extensive history of capital punishment, currently employing mandatory execution as punishment for various crimes. The only execution method currently employed is via hanging using the long-drop method. There is little evidence for a change in policy such as the adoption of lethal injection, with the Singapore Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng informing the Parliament of Singapore that the government "had previously studied the different methods of execution and found no reason to change from the current method used, that is, by hanging".

Recent hangings

Hanging is commonly the method of executing penalties of death in Commonwealth countries that still have it, e.g., Malaysia and Singapore.

A recent case of capital punishment by hanging is that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was convicted of the 1990 murder and rape of a 14 year old girl in Kolkata(Calcutta) in India. Although the Supreme Court of India has suggested that capital punishment be given in the rarest of rare cases, Chatterjee was executed on August 14 2004 in the first execution in West Bengal for eleven years.

On February 27 2004 the mastermind of the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Shoko Asahara, was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Hanging is the common method of execution in capital punishment cases in Japan, although the punishment is rarely executed.

On July 19 2005, two Iranian boys, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, were publicly hanged at Edalat (Justice) Square in Mashhad, northeast Iran, on charges of homosexuality and rape. The punishment has been met with international outrage. At the ages of 15 and 17, respectively, they were discovered having sexual relations. They were imprisoned for fourteen months and subjected to 228 lashes each, then executed. According to the ISNA report as translated by OutRage "They admitted having gay sex but claimed in their defense that most young boys had sex with each other and that they were not aware that homosexuality was punishable by death." Subsequent to their execution the government broadcast the allegation that they had raped a 13-year-old boy, a story rejected by MAHA, the voice of the Iranian gay community.

In Singapore, a 25-year old Australian, Nguyen Tuong Van, was hanged on December 2, 2005 after being convicted of drug trafficking in 2002. Numerous efforts from both the Australian government, numerous QCs (Queens Counsels) and countless petitions from organisations such as Amnesty International failed. Opinion in Australia is divided, with people both opposed to and in support of the death penalty for Nguyen. Many Australian people have said that they will boycott Singapore in a backlash from this hanging. Others, in both Singapore and Australia, have accepted the hanging as law.

Grammar

The term "hanging" is the focus of a famous bit of grammatical trivia. Traditionally, the past tense and past participle of the verb "to hang" are "hung" when referring to the abstract idea of hanging things, but "hanged" when referring to an execution or death by hanging.

A useful way of remembering this is the old school saying, "Meat is hung, men are hanged.'

The distinction is not always followed; but in cases where it is not, such as when, in the song "Why Can't the English?" from the musical My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins sings

By rights she should be taken out and hung

For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

the choice often appears to have been made to suit the rhyme and meter. (Professor Higgins is a linguist, so there may also be an element of intentional irony in his phrasing.)

Folklore

A common legend holds that if the rope used to hang a person breaks three times, it is a sign of divine intervention and the condemned should be released.

See also

• Capital punishment in the United Kingdom
• Death erection
• Gallows
• Hand of Glory
• Jack Ketch
• Lynching
• Official Table of Drops

External links

• 1990 Manual for Hanging in the State of Delaware. Provides mathematical formulas for determining the proper "drop" height of a condemned criminal.
• The Hanging of the convicted Lincoln assassination conspirators

• Execution methods
• Human body positions