Trying To Be Helpful
If the Iraqi “Justice” ministry is going to insist on being medieval in their sentences they might avoid a lot of world condemnation if they would just go out to the ‘Net and look at the the Wikipedia article on Hanging which includes a link to the Official Table of Drops prepared by the UK Home Office.
I’m sure people thought I was just being sarcastic when I said there was a manual on how to do this sort of thing, but torturer and executioner have been civil service positions since the very beginnings of the system in China. Wherever you have civil servants, you have rules and regulations.
4 comments
After centuries of strangulation and bungled executions, not least by the 19th Century hangman Calcraft the tables ensured (which built on the work of a subsequent hangman called Marwood) that the hanged had their necks broken cleanly, rather than strangled or decapitated.
They brought the scientific method to capital punishment to produce a quick, clean death. If you are going to it, do it in a professional manner.
I’m sorry, but if I’m to be executed, give me the guillotine. Quick, immediate, and accurate. Yes, the head rolls down with a who knows what expression. But let’s face it, if you’re dead, you don’t really care about the spectators. Right?
However, life without parole in an Iraqi prison seems to me to be a more appropriate punishment. An execution is way to quick. Plus what would anybody want to see, a martyred Saddam, or an old, weak, useless Saddam. I vote for the latter.
I think throwing them in a cell with no outside contact is the best solution. Let them fade from memory, not create a myth.