Fast Facts About Executions Around the Globe

        As if Iran wasn't drawing enough deep concern over human rights violations, comes word Saturday through various news reports that the Islamic republic recently executed 20 persons on drug trafficking charges.
        All were executed at a prison in Karaj, west of Tehran, making it the 161st hanging in Iran this year, according ATP�s news accounts, the most in any country outside of China.
            Amnesty International estimates China executed 1,178 in 2008, followed by Iran with 346 executions.
            South Carolina governor Mark Sanford might be interested to know that among the charges punishable by death in Iran, in addition to drug trafficking, murder and rape is adultery.
        According to a report  published by Amnesty International in March of this year, in 2008, at least 2,390 people were executed in 25 countries around the world, with at least 8,864 sentenced to death in 52 countries
        In the United States, 37 executions were carried out in nine states in 2008, the most being in Texas with 18
        To gain a better appreciation of the historical roots of executions around the globe and to reflect on how liberated and humane execution laws have become, particularly in Europe and the United States over the centuries, The Morning Delivery has compiled some historical facts about executions dating back to the Roman Empire.

Such as:

• During the Roman Empire, citizens of status condemned to death, assuming their appeal to the assembly failed and opted not to go into exile, were executed by the sword (gladio).

• Execution in the Roman Empire were held at the Forum in Rome, the trial was conducted where lictors, musicians, and heralds attended, the magistrate pronounced the sentence, the execution took place, and then the body was mutilated and removed.

• In Medieval England, executions were put in place as a form of deterrence, so that the number of British crimes punishable by the ``bloody code�� leaped from eight at the end of the 15tht century to 223 by 1880.

• Other countries had some rather peculiar reasons for executing criminals: cursing was used as a reason for execution by the Judeans; giving false testimony was reason enough for the embalming the criminal alive in the Egypt of the Pharos; and the Babylonians would execute for selling bad beer.

• In the Orient, one of their earliest methods of execution was to apply honey to the condemned body, tie them to a stake, and watch them being devoured by wild animals.

• During the Middle Ages, being executed by hanging was thought to be a disgrace; a more honorable way to die was by a beheading

• There were also a number of symbolic tortures, such as tongues of blasphemers being pierced, the impure were often burnt, and the right hand of murderers cut off.

• In England, Henry VIII employed more than 65,000 hangings as a form of execution, largely all public spectacles.

• In medieval Europe, prisoners sentenced for executions were expected demonstrate repentance by encouraging the people to mend their ways or they would face a similar fate; and the criminal�s speeches in 17th century England, were occasionally printed on broadsheets.

• Executions in Paris took place at Place de GrPve, the same place where fireworks soared through the skies, when celebrating births and marriages of the royal family.

• In the United States, public hangings in the 17th and 18th centuries, known as ``Hanging Day��, were popular events, in which both adults and children would frequently attend.

• Despite the popularity of public hangings, they often resulted in rioting, vile behavior, and widespread cases of robberies being reported.

• Lynn Hunt, professor of History at UCLA, and author of ``Inventing Human Rights wrote  that in the winter of 1776, the Morning Post of London complained that the "remorseleless multitude behaved with the most inhuman indecency - shouting, laughing, throwing snowballs at each other, particularly at those few who had a proper compassion for the misfortunes of their fellow creatures."

• Beginning in 1773, an ``Essay on Crimes and Punishments�� written by Cesare Beccaria presented a compelling argument, later used by Edward Livingston and others, why public hangings were ineffective in deterring crime; and in the 1840s.

• Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, is thought to have been influential in convincing legislatures in Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin to eliminate the death penalty.

• The pillory was abolished in France in 1789 and in England in 1837

• Branding was abolished in England (1779) and in France (1832)

• The guillotine, a beheading machine, introduced by Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin was passed by the Constituent Assembly in Paris on March 25, 1792, as more humane way of executing prisoners, rather than having prisoners being slowly hanged, broken on the wheel, or burnt at the stake.
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• England did away with having a hanged body exposed to the public, a practice popularly known as "gibbeting," beginning in 1834; and after 1868, public executions were eliminated and moved to inside prisons

• Practically the whole French aristocracy was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

• Despite the guillotine being devised as a more humane method of execution, it didn�t immediately meet with popular approval of all Parisians. According to Michel Foucalt�s book ``Discipline and Punish�� the Chronique de Paris reported that people complained that they could not see anything and chanted: ``Give us back our gallows��

• Connecticut in 1830 was the first state to abolish public executions, followed by Pennsylvania (1834), New Jersey (1835), and New York (1835).

• By 1845, every state in the northeast, including a number of others, did away with them as well.

• Beginning in 1838, New York City  relocated hangings to the newly opened prison in the Halls of Justice, better known as the "Tombs��

• By 1850, common practices of executions in England, France, and America, such branding, whipping, and the pillory, were abolished and replaced with a news system of prison reform.

• Interestingly enough, Richard J Evans, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, points out that executions in public continued in France until 1939, ``largely because the opponents of the death penalty voted down attempts to put executions inside prison in the belief that this would make capital punishment more acceptable��

• The Prussian Legal Code of 1851 put an end to public executions.

• Public hangings in the United States were for the most part, abolished in larger cites beginning in 1870 and 1880.

• The Electrical Execution Act of 1888 in New York called for executions to take place inside designated state prisons.

• The hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936, which drew an estimated crowd of 10,000, was one of the last public hangings in the United States.

• Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans were the last to be hanged for murder in Britain in 1964.

• On September 10, 1977, Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant, was the last person to be guillotined in France

• Beheading was widely used in Europe and Asia until the 20th century, but is now confined to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, and Iran.

• Executions in the United States were held to be constitutional by the United States Supreme Court decision Wilkerson v Utah, 99, U.S. 130 in 1878.

• In 2008, the Middle East and North Africa carried out the second highest number of executions (508). In Iran, stoning and hanging were among the cruel and inhumane methods used with at least 346 people put to death, including eight juvenile offenders. In Saudi Arabia, public executions are still made public, and beheading has been known to followed by crucifixion.

• Also in 2008, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United States were the countries with the highest rate of executions, representing 93 percent of all executions worldwide.

• Executions in China, Belarus, Mongolia and North Korea are typically carried out without the public's knowledge.

• According to Amnesty International, the following countries carried out executions in 2008: China (at least 1,718), Iran (at least 346), Saudi Arabia (at least 102), USA (37), Pakistan (at least 36), Iraq (at least 34), Viet Nam (at least 19), Afghanistan (at least 17), North Korea (at least 15), Japan (15), Yemen (at least 13), Indonesia (10), Libya (at least 8), Bangladesh (5), Belarus (4), Egypt (at least 2), Malaysia (at least 1), Mongolia (at least 1), Sudan (at least 1), Syria (at least 1), United Arab Emirates (at least 1), Bahrain (1), Botswana (1), Singapore (at least 1) and St Kitts and Nevis (1).

• Methods used to carry out executions in 2008 included beheading (Saudi Arabia), hanging (Bangladesh, Botswana, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, St. Kitts & Nevis, Singapore, Sudan) lethal injection (China, USA), shooting (Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Indonesia, Iran, Mongolia, Viet Nam), stoning (Iran) and electrocution (USA).

Source: Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome By Donald G. Kyle; ``Discipline and Punish�� By Michel Foucalt; ``The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment in the United States�� By Rudloph J. Gerber; ``Death Is Not Worth It�, Arizona State Law Journal, Spring 1996; ``Forbidden Spectacle: Executions, the Public and the Press in Nineteenth Century New York'' By Michael Madow, Buffalo Law Review, Fall, 1995; Amnesty International; Dr. Charlie Mitchell, Assistant Professor at Loyola -College

-Bill Lucey
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