There’s No Such Thing As A Dignified Execution, Ms. Rice

(There’s some graphic detail below, and in the links.)

Discussion of the decapitation hanging of Saddam Hussein’s secret police chief has called it “botched” or purposely cruel. Neither is true. Secretary of State Rice has added to this misunderstanding, with ignorance of the facts of the case and of executions, undermining our Iraq ward and our mission there.

For it to have been botched, hanging would have to be a more precise science than it is. For this hanging to have been purposely cruel would not only have required such greater science of hanging, but is contradicted by the facts of Iraqi effort to make it a faster – more humane -- death, as well as other means being as or more cruel.

Last month, I argued the morality of execution, particularly for extreme crimes and to reaffirm a common purpose opposed to and to deter such extreme crimes. The executions of Saddam and his primary henchmen in mass brutality meet these criteria.

The only valid counterarguments are universal opposition to the death penalty (which I’ll give credit to, and not deal with here), or that the consequences of the execution in public opinion are counterproductive. In this case, despite hues in some press reports, the public opposition to the hangings among Sunnis has been very muted, and the other 80% of the Iraq population who suffered the Saddam regimes’ mass crimes are supportive. Among some in the wider Sunni Arab world, there is criticism of the hangings, but that is also muted by increasing realization of the greater dangers from Shia Iran.

So, a failure on the part of a major U.S. administration figure to understand what happened in the latest hangings can only be seen as ill-focused and dangerous to our mission.

Surely playing somewhat for the local Sunni audience, Secretary of State Condi Rice’s comment, as quoted in the New York Times, on the decapitation of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of Mr. Hussein’s secret police, displayed ignorance, harmful to the Iraq government and to truth.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Egypt on a Middle East tour, joined the recriminations. “I would be the first to say that we were disappointed that there was not greater dignity given to the accused under these circumstances,” she said, referring to Mr. Hussein’s execution and the two carried out Monday. “I think that passions run high after years of turmoil, under dictatorship, and that is apparently what happened. But it shouldn’t have happened and I think that it did not reflect well on the Iraqi government that it came out that way.”

The New York Times’ report added some more useful context. Ms. Rice and the State Department might find it constructive to their role in U.S. foreign policy and execution to be better informed.

Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for Mr. Maliki who supervised the details of Mr. Hussein’s execution, said officials wanted to ensure that Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Bandar died instantly, and were not left dangling at the end of the hanging rope for 15 to 20 minutes before they were asphyxiated, which he said had been a deliberate tactic used in thousands of hangings under Mr. Hussein. That seemed to suggest that the executioners had deliberately allowed for a long “drop” for the two men hanged Monday, to be sure their necks were broken cleanly by their fall.

The Iraqis described the decapitation of Mr. Ibrahim as a “rare incident,” but they acknowledged that a similar thing had happened at least once before in the score or more of hangings that have been carried out since the fall of Mr. Hussein. They cited the case of an Egyptian man hanged in the northern city of Mosul for offenses linked to the insurgency, who had also had his head separated as he fell. In Mr. Hussein’s case, an illicit video taken after the hanging showed a bloody, egg-sized gouge in his neck, below his left ear, where the noose had cut into him as he dropped.

An Internet search for manuals on hanging suggested that Mr. Ibrahim was the victim of an overestimate by his executioners. One of the most authoritative manuals, the United States Army’s “Procedure for Military Executions,” issued under the authority of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was Army chief of staff in 1947, gave a chart that recommended that a man of about Mr. Ibrahim’s weight, about 185 pounds, would need a “drop” of five feet seven inches — nearly two and a half feet less than the drop for Mr. Ibrahim — to assure what the manual called “a proper execution.”

The manual added: “A medical officer should be consulted to determine whether any factors, such as age, health or muscular condition, will affect the amount of drop necessary for a proper execution.”

At his trial, Mr. Ibrahim, though second only to Mr. Hussein in his angry declamations against his Iraqi and American captors, mentioned his need for medication on a number of occasions, and complained bitterly about the “disgusting” American cigarettes he said he was given in lots of 10 a day.

Mr. Ibrahim’s decapitation appeared to have badly unnerved the Maliki government. The Iraqis involved were so shaken that they waited more than seven hours after the 3 a.m. executions to formally announce them, and then read a statement that dwelled on the two men’s “big crimes against humanity” while serving as acolytes to Mr. Hussein. The statement made only a passing reference to the severing of Mr. Ibrahim’s head.

As is made graphically clear in this study of the British experience with hanging, part of a more comprehensive review of capital punishment in the U.K. and elsewhere, neither hanging nor any other method of execution is precise or immediate, and all may often be excruciating or brutal.

Continue Reading (warning: graphic details)

For example, beheading by sword or axe:

Beheading is effective and is probably as humane as any other modern method if carried out correctly. When a single blow is sufficient to decapitate the prisoner, they lose consciousness within a few seconds. They die from shock and anoxia due to haemorrhage and loss of blood pressure within less than 60 seconds. However, because the muscles and vertebrae of the neck are tough, decapitation may require more than one blow. Death occurs due to separation of the brain and spinal cord, after the transection (cutting through) of the surrounding tissues. Consciousness is probably lost within 2-3 seconds, due to a rapid fall of the “intracranial perfusion of blood" (blood supply to the brain).

It has often been reported that the eyes and mouths of people beheaded have shown signs of movement. It has been calculated that the human brain has enough oxygen stored for metabolism to persist about 7 seconds after the head is cut off.

The problem with beheading.
Beheading requires a skilled headsman if it is to be at all humane and not infrequently, several blows are required to sever the head….

In any event, the results are gory in the extreme as blood spurts from the severed arteries and veins of the neck including the aorta and the jugular vein.

Or, consider lethal injection:

Execution by lethal injection takes much longer from start to finish than any other method, typically 30-45 minutes depending on the execution protocol and ease or otherwise of locating a vein.…For the majority of this time, the condemned person is fully aware of what is happening to them and able to experience their execution. They know that they will be dead at the end of it and the fear of suffering (particularly in front of an audience) and of the unknown, is strong in most of us. It is difficult to see, therefore, how it can be considered more humane, as the prisoner is subjected to far more mental anguish over a longer period.

It is fair to say that injection is much less dramatic than the electric chair or hanging and probably easier for the staff and witnesses as it looks more like a surgical procedure than an execution. But does it cause the prisoner less suffering overall?

How about firing squad:

When all goes well, [most effective with a bullet directly to the back of the head] shooting can provide a quick death but there are many recorded instances of it failing to kill the condemned person immediately. There are also instances of people surviving their execution. It would seem that one of the problems of the firing squad is that it is, typically, composed of volunteers rather than professional executioners and it is a task that many people would not find easy to perform when the time comes to actually squeeze the trigger. Shooting is always a gruesome and bloody death.

As to hanging:

Hanging is the oldest but most widely used method of execution in the world today. At very least, 315 men and 4 women were hanged in ten countries during 2006, many in public. These being, Bangladesh, Botswana, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan and Singapore. Sadly, many of those hanged in the 21st century have still had to die by strangulation, particularly in Iran. It is estimated that only 137 of the hangings during 2006 used a drop designed to break the prisoner's neck. Iraq seems to have adopted the American style of hanging and it is unclear exactly what method Jordan uses. …

The processes of judicial hanging.
There are 4 main forms of hanging.
· Short or no drop hanging where the prisoner drops just a few inches, and their suspended body weight and physical struggling causes the noose to tighten, normally resulting in death by strangulation or carotid or Vagal reflex.
· Suspension hanging where the executee is lifted into the air using a crane or other mechanism. Death is caused in the same way as with short drop hanging, although America used weights on the end of the rope to jerk the prisoner into the air, which sometimes resulted in breaking the neck.
· Standard drop hanging where the prisoner drops a predetermined amount, typically 4-6 feet, which may or may not break their neck. This was the normal method adopted in America in the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
· Finally, measured or long drop hanging as practised in Britain from 1874, where the distance the person falls when the trapdoors open is calculated according to the weight, height and physique of the person and is designed to break the neck. This method was adopted in British Colonies and by some other countries who wished to make executions more humane….

Standard drop hanging.
A standard drop, of around 4-6 feet, was used in many American hangings during the later part of the 19th century and into the early 20th century but was not worked out against the weight of the individual. It was considered as an advance on the short drop method previously used. A drop of this distance was often not sufficient to break the prisoner's neck, however, and many still died by strangulation, although in a lot of cases they were knocked unconscious by the force of the drop and the impact of the heavy coiled knot against the side of the neck. Occasionally, they were decapitated when the drop proved to be too long, as happened at the execution of Eva Dugan in Arizona in 1928. Standard drops were given to the 11 senior Nazis executed after the Nuremberg trials and several were reported to have died slowly. The Lincoln conspirators were given a drop of 5 feet at their hanging in 1865 and at least two of the four struggled for some time after they were suspended.

The "Long drop" method as used in Britain….
The long drop method was designed to break the prisoner’s neck by allowing them to fall a pre-determined distance and then be brought up with a sharp jerk by the rope. At the end of the drop, the body is still accelerating under the force of gravity but the head is constrained by the noose which delivers a massive blow to the back and one side of the neck, which combined with the downward momentum of the body, breaks the neck and ruptures the spinal cord causing instant deep unconsciousness and rapid death. The later use of the brass eyelet in the noose tended to break the neck with more certainty. Due to its position under the angle of the left jaw, the head is snapped backward with such force that the posterior aspect of the foramen magnum cuts the spinal cord superior to the top vertebra and just a little inferior to the brain stem.

The accurately measured and worked out drop removed most of the prisoner's physical suffering and made the whole process far less traumatic for the officials who now had to witness it in the confines of the execution cell instead of in the open air.

The drop given in the 19th century was usually between 4 and 10 feet depending on the weight and strength of the prisoner. The weight used to calculate the correct drop is that of the prisoner's body. Up to 1892, the length of drop was calculated to provide a final "striking" force of approximately 1,260 lbs. force which combined with the positioning of the eyelet caused fracture and dislocation of the neck, usually at the 2nd and 3rd or 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae. This is the classic "hangman's fracture". The length of the drop was worked out by the formula 1,260 foot pounds divided by the body weight of the prisoner in pounds = drop in feet. Between 1892 and 1913, a shorter length of drop was used, probably to avoid the decapitation and near decapitations that had occurred with old table. After 1913, other factors were also taken into account and the drop was calculated to give a final "striking" force of around 1,000 lbs. The Home Office issued a rule restricting all drops to between 5 and 8 feet as this had been found to be an adequate range. The American Military manual also specifies a similar range for prisoners of between 120 and 200 lbs. body weight. In Britain, the drop was worked out and set to the nearest quarter of an inch (see below) to ensure the desired outcome….

How hanging causes death….
Where the standard drop proves inadequate to break the neck, the prisoner seems often to suffer a more cruel death than where little or no drop is used. The force generated by a drop of 5 or 6 feet is very considerable and does great damage to the skin, muscles and ligaments of the neck but does not necessarily induce asphyxia any sooner….

The long drop- It takes between a half and three quarters of a second for a person to reach the end of the drop after the trap opens. The force produced by the prisoner's body weight multiplied by the length of fall and the force of gravity, coupled with the position of the noose is designed to cause a virtually instant fracture-dislocation of the neck which leads to death by comatose asphyxia. It is thought that brain death will occur in around 6 minutes and whole body death normally within 10-15 minutes. It is very variable, however, with official reports of from 3-25 minutes for total death to have occurred.

Death is still ultimately caused by asphyxia but the condemned person is deeply unconscious at the time due to dislocation of the cervical vertebrae and the crushing and/or separation of the spinal cord….

In the opinion of Dr. Cornelius Rosse, the chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Washington School of Medicine, the belief that fracture of the spinal cord causes instantaneous death is wrong in all but a small fraction of cases. In this he is certainly right, but the point is whether it causes instantaneous loss of consciousness, which seems highly probable.

Conclusions.
Carried out carefully and humanely, using an accurately measured drop and modern noose, hanging is possibly the least cruel way to execute a criminal. In 20th century Britain, the whole process was over extremely quickly and every effort was made to reduce the criminal's mental and physical suffering. However, as can be seen from the examples cited above, it can also be a very cruel death, if either botched or carried out in such a way as to intentionally cause suffering. It is probable that the countries that execute criminals using little or no drop in public do so in the hope of achieving maximum deterrence and feel that the criminal should be made to suffer for what they have done.

In this case, a long drop was purposely used by the Iraqis to execute, in order to be more humane, providing a faster death. In very few cases, this can result in decapitation, also a fast death.

In either case, good riddance to bad garbage.

In either case, Ms. Rice needs to find her head.