The following macabre details were gleaned from decades of human rights activism with Amnesty International, an morbid interest in repressive regimes, and the background knowledge of a criminal defense lawyer.
There's an art to everything. For example, how much skill does a hangman need? More than you think. The drop has to break the neck without decapitating the condemned (considered a faux pas among aficionados of hanging, although the point of the guillotine), and certainly without subjecting the condemned to slow strangulation. A botched hanging is even more gruesome than a regular one. The hangings of the Nuremberg defendants were supposed to have awful. Of course in the old days of Tyburn, before the invention of the drop, slow strangulation was the norm.
Btw Richard Thompson, always a bundle of cheer if a guitar god, has a fine old faux old English ballad,
Poor Will and The Jolly Hangman:
Won’t you rise for the hangman His pleasure is that you should rise He’s the judge and the jury At the jester’s assize
Poor Will on the gallows tree Never a cruel word did say Oh that a young man Should be treated this way
Run to me mother of anyone’s child And tell me the revelry planned Judges and barristers, clerks at the law His show is the best in the land Here’s a toast to the Jolly Hangman He’ll hang you the best that he can Here’s a toast to the Jolly
No purse for a champion No true love come over the stile The debt of a poor man He’ll pay in awhile Poor ladies, poor gentleman Born of a sorry degree Will you laugh for the hangman When he comes for his fee?
Run to me mother of anyone’s child And tell me the revelry planned Judges and barristers, clerks at the law His show is the best in the land Here’s a toast to the Jolly Hangman He’ll hang you the best that he can Here’s a toast to the Jolly
Rise for the hangman His pleasure is that you should rise He’s the judge and the jury At the jester's assize
http://www.lyricsondemand.com/r/richardthompsonlyrics/poorwillandthejollyhangmanlyrics.html
Execution by decapitation before the guillotine was a touchy matter. It's hard to hack through the neck, it seems, and it often took several tries. Probably the condemned didn't feel much after the spine was severed, but still, it's ugly and graceless. For Ann Boleyn's execution they had to import a French swordsman who could do the job right, in a single stroke.
And hanging, drawing and quartering took considerable skill, to keep the victim alive through the torment and ideally get his heart or other viral organ out of the body fast enough for him to see it in the second before he died or fainted from pain. It's said that Elizabeth's executioner was particularly skilled and that in the hanging, drawing, and quartering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging%2C_drawing_and_quartering
of Dr. Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth's Spanish Converso Jewish physician (he was not openly Jewish), framed in 1594 for treason and attempted poisoning of the Queen,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Lopez_(physician)
was particularly artful, acheiving this gruesome goal.
Hanging drawing and quartering is a form of death by torture, and while torturers do not necessary aim centrally at the death of the victim as opposed to their humiliation and degradation, the general terrorization of the populace, the extraction of information or at least of names and alleged details of alleged crimes so that others might be victimized (a technique familiar from the Inquisition and the witch trials to the cellars of the Lubyanka to Camp Delta at Guantanamo), it poses similar problems.
The torture must be exquisite enough to produce the intended effect without incapacitating the victim or killing him/her immediately, and spectacular enough to make an example of the victim to other potential victims and public at large (as in Lopez's case, or the death of the regicide describe in such unbearable detail at the beginning of Foucault's Discipline and Punish. This is especially tricky if killing the victim is not the object of the exercise or would be an undesired result. The point is that thugs with fists, books, and rubber hoses will often lack the skill of a really good torturer and simply leave the victim insensate, unconscious, or dead.
It's an art. We've sent experts to teach our clients; the Indiana police chief Dan Mitrone, kidnapped and ultimately killed by the Uruguayan Tupemaros guerrillas in the early 1970s was on a torture-training mission -- see AJ Langguths' book Hidden Terrors, one of major steps in my own radicalization, btw. As we know here in Chicago (see ex Police Commander Jon Burge, who tortured scores of arrestees, sent many to prison or to execution with coerced confessors and was actually fired though not prosecuted), the American Police are often quite skilled torturers.
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> By pure coincidence, I picked up a copy of the
> Malleus
> Maleficorum at my local bookstore today.
>
> With respect to the training torturers thing. I've
> always wondered about this. How much training does a
> torturer need? Seems like it should be pretty easy.
> Kneecap, hammer. Fingernail, pointy stick. Head,
> bucket of water.
>
> --- Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Hundreds of years of torture of those accused of
> > being witches and their
> > subsequent confessions.
> >
> > Torture was obviously extremely effective. The
> > inquisitor usually got their
> > witch. Proof positive that witches exist no
> doubt.
> >
> > The various torture churches actually kept pretty
> > good records on this kind
> > of stuff.
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
____________________________________________________________________________________
> Be a better friend, newshound, and
> know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
>
http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ