Executioners

by Phil Clarke

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  Contents

  Introduction

  PART ONE: EARLY FORMS OF EXECUTION

  Crucifixion

  Stoning

  Human Sacrifice

  Ritual Human Sacrifice

  Mayan Sacrifice

  Phalaris

  Buried Alive

  PART TWO: THE SPANISH INQUISITION

  The Papal Inquisition

  Conrad of Marburg

  Robert Le Bougre

  Peter of Verona

  The Spanish Inquisition

  The Procedure

  The Rise and Fall

  Tomás De Torquemada

  Diego De Deza

  Diego Rodríguez Lucero

  PART THREE: THE WITCH HUNTERS

  Witch-hunting Origins

  Matthew Hopkins: Witch-finder General

  Salem

  The Witch-hunters: France

  The Witch-hunters: Germany

  PART FOUR: IMPALEMENT

  Impalement

  Vlad the Impaler

  Ali Pasha

  PART FIVE: NEWGATE PRISON

  Newgate Gaol

  Piene Forte Et Dure

  The Executioners

  PART SIX: TYBURN

  Tyburn

  The Journey to Tyburn

  PART SEVEN: THE GUILLOTINE

  Before the Guillotine

  The Halifax Gibbet

  The Guillotine

  The Sanson Dynasty

  Fernand Meysonnier

  Marcel Chevalier

  PART EIGHT: HANGED, DRAWN & QUARTERED

  Hanging, Drawing, Quartering

  William Calcraft

  Willam Marwood

  James Berry

  The Billingtons

  The Pierrepoint Family

  PART NINE: THE ELECTRIC CHAIR

  The Electric Chair

  The First Electrocutions

  The Procedure

  PART TEN: THE GAS CHAMBER

  The Creation – The Idea

  The Chamber

  Post Execution

  PART ELEVEN: LETHAL INJECTION

  Lethal Injection

  Poor Shots

  Introduction

  To kill in the name of one’s country is a glorious feat, one rewarded by medals. But to kill in the name of the law, that is a gruesome, horrible function, rewarded with scorn, contempt and loathing by the public. french executioner, henri anatole deibler

  Changing Perceptions

  Our ancestors believed that death was an occupa­tional hazard for anyone found guilty of murder or treason. In fact, according to the Bloody Code of 1795, even minor crimes such as theft or the malicious maiming of cattle were punishable by death in England. The British, like the Aztecs, Greeks, Romans and Turks meted out sentences that were, by modern standards, disproportionate with the crimes committed to control the population. These severe punishments did not have their desired effect unless they contained some element of gory entertainment or grand theatre.

  The Performance

  Whatever the form of punishment – be it a simple beheading by axe, or a more elaborate death by burning, drowning or boiling in oil – there have always been people employed by the state to carry them out. Executioners are people with the technical expertise to design an execution from beginning to grisly end, demanding authority and respect while inflicting terrible pain and suffering, and simultaneous­ly fulfilling the illusive ‘entertainment factor’ that makes a public execution an occasion – some­thing people will travel for miles to witness.

  Executioners are undoubtedly a rare breed and their varied responsi­blities often sit uncomfortably on their shoulders. Talented technicians sometimes lack the star quality needed to turn an execution into an event, and often great performers lack the ability to kill cleanly and efficiently without unnecessary mess.

  An Ancient Solution

  The death penalty has existed since the earliest civilisation, in fact execution is probably the oldest form of law enforcement, and therefore the job of executioner is as old as that of a prostitute or priest. Before written laws, before prisons, before court­rooms, juries and judges, the most obvious, the cheapest and often the most convenient punishment was death. During these times an execution would have been an informal affair, the death penalty would have been meted out by an angry mob, and the accused could expect to be stoned to death, or even torn apart by the bare hands of local people in their own communities. Of course, this form of execution still happens in some parts of the world, but today we tend to see that kind of vigilante justice as a crime in itself, and not a state-approved form of punishment.

  The Draconian Code

  In 621 bc, The Draconian Code of Athens declared that any crime, however minor, should be punishable by death. It’s widely thought by historians that Dracon, the Athenian law giver responsible for the code, decided that the minor crimes deserved to be punished by execution, and he simply had no more severe punish­ments for those who had committed more serious crimes.

  In ancient Greece, you could even be forced to become your own executioner. Most famously the philosopher Socrates was forced to drink hemlock by an Athenian jury after being found guilty of impiety. He was instructed to drink the poison and then to walk until his legs grew heavy. Hemlock causes numbness, paralysis and loss of speech followed by failure of the respiratory system and then death. Difficult as it may be to believe, he got off relatively lightly. This was a punishment given to someone from the upper echelons of society since, although death by hemlock is undoubtedly uncomfortable, it is also fairly dignified. Those from a less noble back­ground would have suffered severe pain and humilia­tion, by either being stoned to death or being hurled from a high point behind the Acropolis into a pit of spikes and hooks.

  Emphasis on Pain

  The onus during these early forms of executions was most certainly on painful punishment, rather than painless euthanasia. The guilty were meant to suffer and only God could excuse them from their agonising fate. The executioner was employed to deliver the people’s punishment, to vent the rage and grief of the victim and the victim’s family upon the condemned in a manner that befitted the crime.

  Mistakes Do Happen

  Today, we generally consider ourselves more refined, and less bloodthirsty than our ancestors, but perhaps this is a misconception. Execution by electric chair or lethal injection can be extremely painful and gruesome, and the technicians employed to carry it out have to be aware of this when they take the job. When the electric chair is the method of choice, it is not uncommon for the victim’s skin to bubble and burn or even to catch fire while the victim is still breathing. This is one of the main reasons why so many people oppose it as a form of capital punishment.

  The L
egend of Yellow Mama

  On 22 June 1983, John Louis Evans, a convicted armed robber and murderer, was executed at Holman Prison near Atmore in Alabama. The chair used on this occasion was called Yellow Mama because of its coat of bright yellow paint. It had been built by an inmate in 1927. It was a very old device which hadn’t been used since 1965 – in truth few rational people would happily use a hairdryer this old and decrepit ­ – and yet Yellow Mama was still deemed suitable for executing a man.

  At 8.30 p.m. the first jolt of 1,900 volts shot through Evans’s body. Sparks and flames erupted from the electrode tied to Mr Evans’s left leg and the electrode burst from the strap holding it in place. Then a large cloud of grey smoke and yellow sparks poured from under the hood covering Mr Evans’s face, and the nauseating smell of burning flesh along with a sound like sizzling bacon, filled the room. He was still alive. A second jolt of electricity was administered – more smoke emanated from his leg and head – but he was still breathing. At 8.40 p.m. a third and final jolt of electricity was passed through Mr Evans’s body. At 8.44 p.m. doctors finally pronounced him dead. It had taken 14 minutes to perform the execution. Is that really our definition of a relatively painless, modern and ethically sound punishment? Opinion is fiercely divided.

  Hangman Wanted . . .

  The job description of an executioner has evolved over centuries and varies widely depending on the society that employs them. In pre-Columbian cultures, an executioner was a shaman, a performer of a grand ritual, the representative of divine judgement on the earth – even a god. He was bestowed with the freedom of his community and would have certainly been revered (if not actually worshipped) by his followers.

  In some Middle Eastern cultures, an executioner would have been a member of the victim’s family – a brother or father of the wronged party who was granted the right to visit his rage upon the accused in the form of violent lashes administered using whips or chains. In some parts of Iran, the family of the victim, or the wronged party themselves, still have the oppor­tunity of administering lashes to the accused.

  In Ali Pasha’s Turkey, the condemned were some­times impaled on a stake and slowly roasted over a fire and the close family of the accused were forced to turn the spit – so a person could be made to act as execu­tioner for his or her own kin.

  Billy–No-Mates

  Professional executioners are often shunned by society. They are usually feared, hated and avoided by their peers, which is why so many of them opt for anonymity over notoriety. The Australian executioners, who had usually been transported to the colonies for com­mitting a crime themselves and were living in communities of people from the same criminal background, did everything in their power to conceal their true identities – often wearing false humpbacks and thick black beards – this explains why they are all nicknamed ‘blackbeard’ in surviving historical records. In Britain, many executioners chose to operate under the moniker ‘Jack Ketch’.

  Some executioners have remained almost anony­mous while others rose to celebrity status. The Pierrepoints of England are still celebrated as a famous family of hangmen, producing three generations of executioners for the crown. The business of execution in many parts of the world is largely the domain of various families. The children are indoctrinated into the profession early in life and employed as assistants to their more experienced fathers and grandfathers. Their responsibilities might involve setting up the guillotine or gallows, holding a prisoner’s neck in place while the blade is hoisted, or simply cleaning up the mess afterwards. They will continue in such a role until they have learnt the trade well enough to take over as head executioner, hence you will often find that a family name reoccurs again and again during the course of this book.

  Today’s Executioners

  Today, most executions are conducted in private and therefore executioners are more like technicians than entertainers. Their primary responsibility is to make sure the process is conducted with decorum and scientific precision. In the province of Yunnan in China, mobile execution teams travel in vans converted from 24 seat buses, administering lethal injections at all times of the day or night. The window­less execution chamber contains a stretcher where the prisoner is strapped down. When the needle is attached by a doctor, a police officer presses a button which releases an automatic syringe, administering the lethal drug into the prisoner’s vein. The execution can be watched on a video monitor and can be recorded if necessary. When the proce­dure is complete, the van simply drives away with its newly deceased cargo. The prisoner will be quickly cremated or, it is often claimed, harvested for viable body parts. This sinister development in China’s capital punishment programme has been called ‘progress’, but others regard the execution bus as the modern equivalent of the phantom coach and horses of popular legend, arriv­ing as if out of nowhere to transport their unwitting passenger into the afterlife, for better or worse.

  This book explores the incredible lives and careers of the men and women employed to kill on behalf of the state, as well as those leaders who were ultimately responsible for ordering torture and execution and dreaming up new and creative methods of punish­ment. We investigate various tech­niques and the people who championed them, as well as the lives of the victims who, through their own evil-doing or through sheer misfortune, endured the most terrible pain and suffering ever inflicted by man. What, if anything, did they do to deserve it? And what went through the executioner’s mind as he delivered the fatal blow?

  PART ONE: EARLY FORMS OF EXECUTION

  Crucifixion

  Crucifixion stands out as one of the most infamous punishments in our history. One that symbolises a religion and is best remembered for one specific act that took place upon a hill named Golgotha outside the walls of Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago: the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet this torturous penalty was a common practice long before the time of Jesus, dating back as far as Babylonian and Egyptian times almost 2,000 years earlier.

  Indeed, it was carried out in huge numbers. The Persian emperor, Darius The Great, crucified 3,000 Babylonian captives in 519 bc. Alexander the Great continued the custom during his siege of Tyre in 332 bc executing 2,000 of his enemies. These mass cruci­fixions pale in compari­son, however, with events following the end of the Third Servile War in 71 bc. Two years before, a band of rebel slaves, led by ex-gladiator Spartacus, was successful in threatening the Roman Republic. In retaliation, the senate sent Commander Marcus Licinius Crassus to crush the revolt, resulting in the capture of approximately 6,000 rebels. Crassus ordered them to be executed by way of crucifixion along a 200-kilometre (124-mile) stretch of the Appian Way from Rome to Capua.

  Rome, it is thought, acquired this capital punish­ment from the Carthaginians, who applied the penalty for relatively minor offences. In Carthage, nobody was exempt from the cross. Even their own generals would be nailed to wood following defeat on the battlefield. Rome, however, did not crucify its citizens unless they were convicted of high treason. The punishment was reserved for those most despised by the state. Slaves, rebels, traitors were fodder for the cross. So, too, were the Jews, who were severely persecuted under Roman rule.

  Much of what we know about Roman crucifixion comes from the writings of one particular Jew: Josephus – a Judean diarist and historian who later defected to Rome around ad 71. He describes the punishment as, ‘the most wretched of deaths’ believing suicide to be a more preferable way to die. It was such a feared method that just the threat of crucifixion caused an entire garrison at Machaeus to surrender. Another account from the records of Josephus tells of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in ad 70 in which more than one million people died, the majority of them Jewish. The Romans surrounded the city walls and crucified around 500 Jews a day stopping only when they found they had no more wood for crosses.

  Even animals were liable to fall foul of the cross. Pliny the Elder, in his work Naturalis Historia, tells of the Battle of the Allia in around 387 bc when a Gallic army was able
to invade via the Capitoline Hill due to the lack of warning from the guard dogs of Rome. The Romans were so furious that the dogs were crucified for their lack of vigilance and, from then on, mass canine crucifixions were held upon the hill every year in remembrance.

  Prelude to the Cross – The Beginning of the End

  The punishment did not begin with the crucifixion. Before the agony of the cross, the condemned were forced to carry the horizontal cross-beam or patibulum weighing approximately 45.3 kilograms (100 pounds) from the prison to beyond the city walls and the execution site. On this final journey past crowds that flocked to jeer the disgraced criminal on their way, the condemned were struck by their guards using whips with small pieces of metal or bone at the tips which ripped chunks of flesh from their bodies, causing heavy loss of blood and, in many cases, severe shock. This was called scourging and many died from this preliminary punishment before even reaching their destination.

  On their arrival, the victims were stripped naked and their clothes divided among the unit of soldiers that had led the procession carrying the titulus or small sign on a staff stating the felon’s crime. Nailed above the victim’s head, this sign would join the condemned upon the cross for all to see.

  Before the nailing, the victim would be offered a medicinal brew called ‘the sopor’ to numb the pain. Far from a miracle aid, its ingredients consisted purely of a cup of vinegar mixed with gall and myrrh. While this seems to conflict with the desire for prolonged suffer­ing, it should be considered that such a potion providing anaesthetic qualities would have potentially forestalled premature death and therefore allowed the condemned to remain conscious during his sentence. This fits the common belief that torture played a large part in crucifixion. Far from just a death penalty, the plan was to subject the body to as much pro­longed physical pain as possible.