The big news item of the day, so far, apparently, unreported on dKos, is that an Iraqi appeals court has upheld Saddam Hussein's death sentence. According to Iraqi law (almost an oxymoron these days), Saddam must hang within 30 days.
Hanging has been around nearly as long as humanity itself. How will the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi government kill Saddam? This is a diary about hanging and what we know about how Saddam will die. Warning: This diary is not for the squeamish!
Let me start by saying that I am opposed to the death penalty under all circumstances. There has been much talk of late that it should be abolished because of the number of innocent people who are executed. The true test of opposition to the death penalty is not, it has been said, whether one is opposed to executing the innocent, however. It is easy to be against executing the innocent. What is harder is to be opposed to executing those, like Saddam, who are truly guilty of horrendous crimes. I fall into this camp. I do not think killing is right under any circumstances. This is an issue I have studied for most of my life, however, and it is one that I have developed some expertise in, especially as concerns methods of execution.
This diary is not, however, about the death penalty and why you should be opposed to it. This diary is about the apparently impending execution of Saddam Hussein and the method by which it will be carried out.
There are two main methods of hanging that have been used through history. The most basic is known as the "short drop." In short drop hanging, the victim is typically turned off of a ladder or placed on a cart which is then pulled out from under him. Either method leaves him suspended in mid-air. Death by short-drop hanging is a messy affair. Death is usually by asphyxia. The condemned typically struggles on the noose for from one to three minutes.
Rippling movements of the body and limbs may occur for some time which are usually attributed to nervous and muscular reflexes. Where death has been caused by strangulation, the face will typically have become engorged and cyanosed (turned blue through lack of oxygen). There will be the classic sign of strangulation - petechiae - little blood marks on the face and in the eyes from burst blood capillaries. The tongue may protrude. . . In some cases there will have been effusions of urine, semen and faeces.
Death takes between 15 and 20 minutes. In England, the hangman was required to let the condemned hang for an hour "just to be sure."
Short drop hanging was the only kind anybody knew about up until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was utilized all over the continent, along with beheading, as one of the milder forms of capital punishment, more severe forms such as breaking on the wheel being reserved for more serious crimes such as murder. The British, in contrast, utilized hanging almost exclusively for all felonies, except in cases of high treason, when the penalty was enhanced through drawing and quartering.
Hangmen in Britain were overwhelmingly amateurs, which is one reason the technique never became refined as, for instance, beheading did in France with the introduction of the guillotine. Indeed, it took until the 1870s for things to change, when William Marwood introduced the long drop [WARNING: graphic photos]. In long drop hanging, based on weight, a drop is calculated which is supposed to break the prisoner's neck. If the drop is too short, the prisoner dies by asphyxiation, as in short drop hanging. If the drop is too long, the prisoner may be decapitated. If the drop succeeds in breaking the prisoner's neck but does not decapitate him, death is by asphyxia, as in short drop hanging, but the breaking of the neck renders the prisoner unconscious, so there is no sensation (supposedly -- no one has ever lived to tell about it). The table of drops Marwood developed resulted in such a decapitation, and in 1892 and 1913, the British Home Office issued new tables with revised drops. The old and new British tables of drops may be found here. No better table of drops has ever been developed, and the 1913 table of drops continues to be used in many former British colonies, including Singapore.
Hanging crossed the Atlantic with the British and was the only form of capital punishment utilized in Canada up through abolition in 1976 (the last executions took place in 1962). In the United States, hanging was utilized exclusively through 1896, when states, beginning with New York, began to switch to the electric chair. The electric chair and lethal gas were the main methods of execution through most of the 20th Century in the United States, until capital punishment was temporarily abolished in 1972 in Furman v. Georgia. Upon restoration of the death penalty in the midseventies, most states turned to lethal injection, but Utah continued to use the firing squad until recently, and the last hanging in the United States took place in 1996, when Delaware hanged Billy Bailey. Refinements in the U.S. largely followed those in Britain; all 20th Century hangings in the U.S. were either by the long drop or the somewhat less-dependable standard drop, in which the condemned drops approximately five feet regardless of weight. This was the method used to execute the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The hangings were botched.
So what do we know about the procedure that will be used to execute Saddam within the next 30 days? Surprisingly little. The new Iraqi government has hanged at least 41 people since its inception. Time tells us a little about the procedure (and the linked article puts the number at closer to 90):
several executions have been beset by glitches and logistical snafus. At first, executioners used an old rope left over from Saddam's regime that stretched too much to break the condemned's neck; it sometimes took as long as eight minutes for the hanged to die. New ropes brought in for later executions jerked harder on the convicted person's spine, but executioners soon noticed the cords fraying on the bend of the reinforced steel installed in the cement ceiling of the gallows. During a recent round of executions, on Sept. 6, the rope snapped after 12 hangings, sending a condemned man plummeting 15 ft. through the trap door onto the hard concrete floor below. Miraculously, he survived. "Allah saved me!" he shouted. "Allah saved me!" For 40 minutes, prison guards, officials and witnesses engaged in heated arguments over whether or not to interpret the broken rope as divine intervention.
Apparently, Iraq uses some version of either the long drop or the standard drop, since they're at least trying to break the condemned's neck. But it looks like the procedure is far from the seven-second record set by Britain's master hangman Albert Pierrepoint. (Iraq's neighbor Iran still uses the short drop WARNING: graphic picture, including in this recent and internationally condemned hanging of two gay teenagers. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, short drop hanging is still used in many Middle Eastern countries.)
We do not know how Saddam will be hanged or how efficiently the procedure will go. But a few things are for sure: the international community will condemn the execution, as will the human rights community. And hanging Saddam will further fan the flames of sectarian violence civil war.