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00:00:00Transcription by CastingWords
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00:01:43In a world without modern societal structures such as criminal courts and prisons,
00:01:48the biblical notion of an eye for an eye was seen as suitable punishment for a perpetrator and compensation for the victim.
00:01:58As more complex societies developed, so did the methods of execution,
00:02:04some designed to be swift and efficient, but many others deliberately crafted to prolong the experience as much as possible,
00:02:12for the dual purpose of inflicting the maximum amount of suffering whilst providing the most gruesome entertainment to onlookers.
00:02:21Today, much of the world has now outlawed capital punishment.
00:02:25What was once seen as God's will and righteous justice now seems cruel and inhumane to the eyes of many.
00:02:34Modern societies like to think of themselves as more enlightened than those of the distant past,
00:02:40but, as we shall see, it is humanity's recent past that demonstrates most terribly
00:02:47how the state's power to end the lives of those seen as criminals can be abused.
00:02:53The very earliest set of written laws that still survives to this day, known as the Code of Hammurabi,
00:03:15not only specified which crimes were capital offences, but also the specific manner in which the convicted criminal was to be put to death.
00:03:25Richard Felix is a paranormal historian, television presenter and author.
00:03:31The earliest record that I know of is in Babylon when they actually created 25 different offences that you could be executed for.
00:03:43For burglary, the convict would be hung from a gibbet constructed at the site where the crime took place.
00:03:50For rape, bigamy or seduction of a daughter-in-law, drowning was the specified punishment.
00:03:56And in cases of incest or looting, the convict was to be burnt alive.
00:04:01In the instance of a man caught looting from a building that was on fire,
00:04:06it was entirely legal to force him back inside the burning building to suffer his fate.
00:04:14Even lesser crimes could result in horrific punishments, often involving the brutal severing of a body part.
00:04:21Ancient methods of execution were some of the most torturous ever devised.
00:04:28One unusual form of execution favoured in ancient Greece was known as scaphidon.
00:04:34They actually put you in a boat, another boat upside down on top of you,
00:04:41put your head hanging out of the boat, covered your face with honey and set you off out to sea.
00:04:50The horrific results were described by Greek philosopher Plutarch.
00:04:55They keep his face continually turned towards the sun,
00:04:59and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it.
00:05:05When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off,
00:05:10they find his flesh devoured.
00:05:13Ancient Egypt was home to a sophisticated justice system of courts and judges.
00:05:22However, it operated under the principle of guilty until proved innocent,
00:05:26and the sentences could be as barbaric as any in the ancient world.
00:05:32Mutilation and flogging were common punishments for minor offences,
00:05:36and for capital crimes, execution could be carried out by beheading,
00:05:41being buried alive, drowned, impaled, or even being fed to crocodiles.
00:05:47In South East Asian territories, slow slicing, otherwise known as death by a thousand cuts,
00:05:55was a punishment for the most serious offences.
00:05:58You were literally stripped naked, tied to a post, and then pieces of your flesh were cut away.
00:06:08They even had a set of knives with labels on that they would just pick at random.
00:06:15So if that one said tongue, then out came your tongue.
00:06:19If that one said breast, then off came the breast.
00:06:23And they continued for hours and hours cutting small pieces of flesh.
00:06:28And then the last one, the coup de grace, of course, was the dagger that said heart.
00:06:34And that was plunged into the heart to kill.
00:06:38Families of the person that was going to be executed would sometimes bribe the executioner,
00:06:43so that he made sure that he picked the heart knife first.
00:06:50In other parts of Asia, crushing or dismembering by elephant was a preferred method of execution.
00:06:57The ability to control a large animal such as an elephant was a significant demonstration of power and authority.
00:07:05They would train an elephant, of course, to not necessarily stand straight on the heart,
00:07:13but crush other parts of the body first, which is, again, a long, slow death.
00:07:19The impressive spectacle of such an act was considered a powerful deterrent,
00:07:24so much so that the practice continued until comparatively modern times
00:07:28and was described in the kingdom of Siam by Scottish sea captain Alexander Hamilton.
00:07:35The condemned person is made fast to a stake, driven into the ground for the purpose,
00:07:41and when the elephant's keeper speaks to the monstrous executioner,
00:07:45he twines his trunk round the person and stake and, pulling the stake from the ground with great violence,
00:07:51tosses the man and the stake into the air and, in coming down, receives him on his teeth,
00:07:58and, making him off again, puts one of his forefeet on the carcass and squeezes it flat.
00:08:06One of the more conventional and certainly most well-known methods of capital punishment used in the ancient world was crucifixion.
00:08:16Whilst most commonly associated with the death of Jesus Christ,
00:08:19the use of crucifixion as both a criminal punishment and as a method for disposing of vanquished enemies
00:08:26can be dated back to many centuries before the time of Jesus.
00:08:31Alexander the Great, king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon,
00:08:36is said to have crucified 2,000 survivors from his siege of the Phoenician city of Tyre in 332 BC.
00:08:43By the time of the Roman Empire, crucifixion was commonly used as a punishment for capital crimes.
00:08:51Thousands and thousands of people were crucified by the Romans.
00:08:58Whilst the depiction of Jesus nailed upon the cross is to much of the world an indelible image
00:09:03and one which epitomizes the act of crucifixion, in fact the Romans carried out many types of crucifixion.
00:09:11Sometimes they crucified you upside down, which of course was actually more humane,
00:09:18because you would die quicker of unconsciousness.
00:09:20Roman philosopher Seneca the Young once observed,
00:09:25I see crosses there, not just of one kind, but made in many different ways.
00:09:30Some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms on the gibbet.
00:09:35The original Latin word that today we translate as crucifixion actually applied to many different forms of painful execution,
00:09:46including being impaled on a stake or affixed to a tree, an upright pole,
00:09:52and of course an upright pole with a cross beam as popularly depicted today.
00:09:56As the Roman soldiers guarding the execution site could not leave until death had occurred,
00:10:04they were sometimes tempted to help things along.
00:10:10The guards stayed with you for the whole time, because you would last for days,
00:10:14but sometimes the guards would actually finish you quicker,
00:10:18as they reckon they did with Jesus, of course with the spear.
00:10:22In other cases, however, the person was often deliberately kept alive as long as possible,
00:10:28to prolong their suffering and humiliation.
00:10:31In the case of a slave being convicted of killing their master,
00:10:36all of the victim's slaves would be crucified,
00:10:39a practice which sometimes involved dozens or even hundreds of innocent people being executed.
00:10:45When Roman senator Lucius Secundus was murdered by a slave,
00:10:49some in the Senate tried to prevent the mass crucifixion of 400 of his slaves,
00:10:55but in the end, tradition prevailed, and every single one was executed.
00:11:00Such cruelty was not without controversy, even at the time.
00:11:05Celebrated Roman philosopher Cicero described it as a most cruel and disgusting punishment.
00:11:12He famously wrote,
00:11:13It is a crime to bind a Roman citizen.
00:11:17To scourge him is a wickedness.
00:11:20To put him to death is almost parasite.
00:11:23What shall I say of crucifying him?
00:11:26So guilty an action cannot by any possibility be adequately expressed by any name bad enough for it.
00:11:33About the centuries as empires fell and nations was warred
00:11:39Over the centuries, as empires fell and nations warred,
00:11:57methods of torture and execution became ever more cruel and imaginative.
00:12:03In Europe, during the Middle Ages,
00:12:04the death penalty was commonly used as a punishment even for minor offenses.
00:12:09Execution by breaking the body over a wheel was a technique first explored by the Romans.
00:12:16They fixed the prisoner about a great wheel,
00:12:20whereof the noble-hearted youth had all his joints dislocated and all his limbs broken.
00:12:26The whole wheel was stained with his blood.
00:12:30However, use of the breaking wheel, as it was to become known,
00:12:35was popularized as a form of public execution throughout much of Europe during the Middle Ages.
00:12:42I think the most inhumane form of execution is breaking on the wheel.
00:12:49You were taken to the execution on a cart.
00:12:53But on the way, the executioner had a brazier of coals and a pair of pincers.
00:12:59And they would rip flesh from your body before you even got to the execution.
00:13:05They would then pour either boiling oil or sulphur, sometimes boiling lead, into the wound.
00:13:15They would then strap you to a wheel and break you.
00:13:19And that's smashing your bones, starting with the ankle, the shin, the knee, the thigh.
00:13:26Then the same with the next leg.
00:13:28Then one arm, the wrist, the shoulder, then the next arm.
00:13:34This could take as long as the executioner wanted to take it.
00:13:37And then the coup de grace would be a blow to the chest.
00:13:41This was either done with a metal bar or sometimes a sledgehammer.
00:13:47Once this torture was complete, the convict would then be tied to the wheel,
00:13:52which was then raised up on a pole or mast, ready for a slow and agonizing death,
00:13:58not unlike a crucifixion.
00:14:00Eventually, the body was burnt and your ashes scattered to the wind.
00:14:05The fear of witchcraft that spread throughout Europe and early American settlers
00:14:12proved another source of victims for those that delighted in the most cruel of punishments.
00:14:18Thou shalt not permit a sorceress to live.
00:14:26Between 1400 and 1775, approximately 100,000 people were tried and prosecuted
00:14:33for witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies.
00:14:36Around half of these were executed.
00:14:40You had to prove they were a witch, which was a bit difficult.
00:14:45So they were stripped naked to search for the devil's mark, a birthmark, a wart.
00:14:51If none of those things happened, then it was up to God to decide, trial by ordeal.
00:14:55They tied your left toe to your right thumb, your left thumb to your right toe,
00:15:00rope round you and threw you in the pond.
00:15:04If you sank to the bottom, you were innocent.
00:15:08If you rose to the surface, as most people did, you were a witch.
00:15:13Under the law of Queen Elizabeth, witchcraft was a criminal offence, a hanging offence.
00:15:19The most common form of execution for those convicted of witchcraft was to be burnt at the stake,
00:15:25where the condemned was tied to a large wooden stake and a fire lit under them,
00:15:31resulting in a protracted and agonising death.
00:15:34Sometimes the executioner would tie a rope round the neck and pull on the rope
00:15:40and strangle them as the flames were getting higher, but often they were burnt alive.
00:15:46In some cases, as a small act of mercy, a container of gunpowder was attached to the victim,
00:15:54which would explode once heated by the fire, killing them instantly.
00:16:02There is just one European leader who is remembered to this day more for his preferred manner of execution
00:16:08than for any other achievement.
00:16:11Vlad Dracula, better known as Vlad the Impaler, ruled Romania during the 15th century,
00:16:17and stories of his immense cruelty circulated far and wide,
00:16:22both during his life and after his death in 1476.
00:16:27With the invention of the printing press, books detailing his exploits,
00:16:31together with lurid drawings, were bestsellers of the time.
00:16:35Vlad had a big copper cauldron built and put a lid made of wood with holes in it on top.
00:16:42He put the people in the cauldron and put their heads in the holes and fastened them there.
00:16:48Then he filled it with water and set a fire under it
00:16:51and let the people cry their eyes out until they were boiled to death.
00:16:57He was, of course, best known for sentencing his enemies to impalement.
00:17:01That's a spiked wooden pole that was greased and then placed in any aperture that they could find,
00:17:10usually the anus.
00:17:12They would hoist them onto it and then leave them there as they slipped down the pole
00:17:20until it came out of all different parts of the body, sometimes even the mouth.
00:17:26This was a vile, disgusting form of execution.
00:17:31He ordered that women be impaled together with their suckling babies on the same stake.
00:17:37The babies fought for their lives at their mother's breasts until they died.
00:17:42Then he had the women's breasts cut off and put the babies inside head first.
00:17:47Thus he had them impaled together.
00:17:50It was said that even after his eventual defeat and imprisonment,
00:17:55Vlad took to capturing rats in his prison cell and impaling them on scraps of wood.
00:18:01To be hanged, drawn and quartered was possibly the bloodiest method of execution carried out in Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages.
00:18:10The whole thing was symbolic. It was a form of torture, even though torture was illegal in England, but it was to make you suffer and it was to send you to hell.
00:18:23Possibly the most gruesome punishment ever devised, it was reserved for those found guilty of high treason.
00:18:30The sentence for a traitor was that you'd be taken from this jail and dragged backwards to a place of execution.
00:18:40Backwards because what you'd thought up treason was unnatural.
00:18:44There you'll be hanged between heaven and earth, not fit to inhabit either.
00:18:50We're talking of slow strangulation.
00:18:52So after two or three minutes, you would still be alive.
00:18:56You'd be taken down, laid on a drawing, quartering and beheading block, which is a butcher's block for human beings.
00:19:03Your privy parts cut off and burnt before your eyes.
00:19:09Your bowels and entrails to be ripped out of your belly because of the inward treacherous thoughts that you'd had. Treason.
00:19:19A good executioner would get you disembowelled, all 37 feet, small intestine, while you're still alive and conscious.
00:19:32Your head to be severed from your body because your head had thought up the treacherous thoughts.
00:19:39And your body divided into four equal quarters.
00:19:44And those quarters to be at the disposal of whatever monarch was on the throne at the time.
00:19:50All of this would take place in public, before a baying crowd.
00:19:55And in the case of multiple executions, convicts would be forced to watch the disembowelment of their fellow inmates before it was done to them.
00:20:04Finally, the convict was beheaded and put on display as a gruesome warning to others.
00:20:10In some cases, the head would be pickled in a jar, in an attempt to ensure the face remained recognisable.
00:20:21Although this most extreme form of punishment was not used routinely, and was reserved only for cases of high treason,
00:20:28There are many examples of its use that are still remembered to this day, such as the execution of Scottish knight, Sir William Wallace.
00:20:38When William Wallace was hang-drawn and quartered, his quarters were taken to different parts of the country.
00:20:44And the reason was that if the body wasn't whole, then on the day of judgment, he'd go to hell.
00:20:53Members of the English nobility convicted of wrongdoing faced a punishment more in keeping with their status in society.
00:21:04Beheading was reserved for kings and queens and aristocrats.
00:21:10However, no matter the status of the convict, the executioner himself may not always have been up to the task.
00:21:18You've got an executioner that's probably taken from the condemned cell and asked to become an executioner.
00:21:25He's the lowest of the low, and he's got to chop the king's head off, the queen's head off, lord so-and-so's head off.
00:21:32Now, he would be nervous, and of course there's one very good way of calming your nerves down before an execution, and that's alcohol.
00:21:40So the chances of taking a head off in one blow was very remote.
00:21:45It took three blows to take off the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and five blows to take off the head of the Duke of Monmouth.
00:21:54After the fourth blow, the body was still moving, and Monmouth was still alive.
00:21:59In order to avoid such suffering, it was customary for the condemned person to pay their executioner a tip.
00:22:08The more generous the payment, it was hoped, the swifter the death would be.
00:22:13Lawrence Shirley, the fourth Earl Ferrars, who'd murdered his bailiff.
00:22:18When he gave his purse of gold or silver, he handed it to the assistant executioner instead of the executioner, and there was a punch-up on the scaffold.
00:22:29Across the channel in France, the heading was seen as much more of a skilled profession.
00:22:36In France, they did it with a sword, and you had to kneel down with your neck up, and the executioner would swing and take the head off like that.
00:22:49One of the most celebrated French executioners was Charles-Henri Sanson.
00:22:55Sanson was the royal executioner during the reign of King Louis XVI, and was the fourth in a sixth-generation family dynasty of executions.
00:23:05The Sanson family, there were seven members of the Sanson family, all became executioners.
00:23:13It was passed down sometimes from father to son, from uncle to nephew.
00:23:20During his lifetime, Sanson personally executed almost 3,000 people.
00:23:26On one occasion, he was called upon to execute a young nobleman for the crime of blasphemy.
00:23:32Regarding Jean-Francois Lefebvre, Chevalier de la Barre, we declare him convicted of having taught to sing and sung impious, execrable and blasphemous songs against God,
00:23:47and of having profaned the sign of the cross in making blessings accompanied by foul words.
00:23:54He was a young man, and he obviously had to kneel.
00:24:00And Sanson said, sir, will you kneel?
00:24:03And he said, I am an aristocrat, I will not kneel.
00:24:06And he remained standing.
00:24:08Sanson took one blow and went straight through the neck.
00:24:13The body continued to stand with the head still on the neck.
00:24:18Sanson looked at him and said, shake yourself, it's done.
00:24:23And then the head rolled off and the body crumpled onto the floor.
00:24:43In the 18th century, the idea that the condemned man should be forced to suffer as much as possible began to be replaced by a drive for sheer efficiency.
00:24:54When the French Revolution came, a very famous executioner called Henry Sanson, who beheaded people with a sword, realised that if he was going to have to execute all these clerics, religious people, aristocrats, he'd need a lot of swords.
00:25:11Luckily, a gentleman of the National Assembly, Dr Ignatius Guillotine, came up with what he believed to be a humane form of execution.
00:25:23The guillotine.
00:25:26The guillotine was praised for its efficiency.
00:25:29An efficiency that allowed for an astonishing 17,000 executions to take place in the course of just one revolutionary year.
00:25:40When they originally designed it, it had a crescent-shaped blade.
00:25:46And that wasn't efficient enough because that actually crushed the neck before it took the head off.
00:25:53And would you believe, Louis XVI, he was a bit of an engineer and he had a look at the guillotine when it was first being made and realised that it would be far better to have a blade at an angle of 45 degrees, which would slice through the neck quickly.
00:26:09He was one of the first people executed on the guillotine.
00:26:16There is some evidence to suggest that death by guillotine may not be as quick and painless as may appear.
00:26:22There was a lot of discussion and debate about whether the brain continued to function after the head had been taken off.
00:26:32In 1905, a doctor bureau got permission to stand by the guillotine when a chap called Longville was beheaded.
00:26:44I was able to note immediately after the decapitation, the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds.
00:26:56The doctor waited a few seconds and then shouted, Longville!
00:27:01I called in a strong, sharp voice, Longville!
00:27:06I saw the eyelids slowly lift up with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.
00:27:12Next, Longville's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.
00:27:19I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.
00:27:24Though it remains most famous as a device connected to the French Revolution and the 1700s, the guillotine remained as the official method of execution in France well into modern times and was still in use in the 1970s.
00:27:45In England in the year 1810, Sir Samuel Romilly stated in the British Parliament that there was,
00:27:52No country on the face of the earth in which there have been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England.
00:28:03Over the course of the next century, this was to change, with vast numbers of minor crimes being removed from the list of capital offences.
00:28:12Public executions ceased in 1868, not because the public appetite for them had diminished,
00:28:19but because many influential figures at the time saw that they had become little more than an entertainment, often accompanied by the selling of alcohol.
00:28:28Charles Dickens wrote in a letter to the Times newspaper,
00:28:33I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonker Lane this morning.
00:28:38I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man.
00:28:50The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing of the assembled spectators.
00:29:00It would be like a day at the fair. There'd be pie sellers, people selling a programme of your trial and life to read about you as you were dangling at the end of a rope.
00:29:12There'd be pickpockets there, riots, people would be drunk. It came from higher up. This was too popular. We must stop it.
00:29:21With the end of public executions, the need for especially cruel and gruesome punishments was also at an end.
00:29:30Death by beheading and quartering was officially abolished in 1870.
00:29:36All executions for the rest of the 19th century were to be carried out by hanging.
00:29:42In each town, there would be a county gallows, which would be a football goal, and then there would be one ladder, sometimes two ladders.
00:29:52You would go up one ladder, the rope would be fixed round your neck, the execution would be up the other ladder, fixing it.
00:29:59He'd come down and then he would turn you off, as it was called, turning you off the ladder, and you died of slow strangulation.
00:30:07Before 1850, the short drop was the standard method of hanging.
00:30:12Thanks to the work of Irish doctor Samuel Horton, the short drop was superseded in the second half of the century by what came to be known as the standard drop.
00:30:23It was a platform with a lever and a trap door.
00:30:27When the trap door opened and you dropped through, it would sever between the second and third vertebrae, bringing about, hopefully, an instantaneous death.
00:30:38However, the standard drop was no guarantee of a quick death.
00:30:43Famous examples of the failure of this technique include the execution of convicted US Civil War criminal, Henry Wurtz.
00:30:52Wurtz was hanged in November 1865, watched by a crowd of spectators, but the drop failed to break his neck.
00:31:01Spectators were forced to watch as Wurtz was slowly strangled over the course of 20 minutes.
00:31:08The standard drop was later superseded by the long drop, developed by William Marwood, himself a practising executioner.
00:31:16The exact height of the drop varied depending on the height of the convict, from as little as four feet to as much as eight feet.
00:31:24William Marwood, clever as he was, at the beginning, he only measured the victim. He didn't weigh them.
00:31:32So a man of five foot seven and twelve stone got the same drop as a man of five foot seven and twenty stone.
00:31:39The danger with using the long drop technique was that if there was a miscalculation, the results could be horrific.
00:31:48American outlaw Tom Ketchum, known by the nickname Black Jack, was executed for train robbery using the long drop technique in 1901.
00:31:58Ketchum's weight was measured when he was taken into custody, but was not re-measured prior to his execution, despite significant weight gain during his time in jail.
00:32:10The extra weight was therefore not taken into account when the drop was calculated for his execution.
00:32:17As Ketchum dropped with the noose around his neck, the force was so violent that his head was torn from his spine, an image that was captured by a photographer.
00:32:27This and other such incidents caused many United States authorities to look at alternative methods of execution.
00:32:36The electric chair, which was to become synonymous with executions in the United States, was first conceptualized by a New York dentist in 1881 to be a more humane form of death than hanging.
00:32:51The initial design took the form of a custom-built wooden chair, with electrodes that attached to the victim's head and leg.
00:33:00After a variety of tests on animals, authorities and experts remained unsure as to the precise current of electricity that was required to bring about instant death.
00:33:11The first official execution by electric chair was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a gruesome affair.
00:33:18William Francis Kemmler was convicted of killing his common-law wife, Tilly Zeigler, in 1889, and his execution was to be carried out by electric chair on the 6th of August 1890.
00:33:31Kemmler's last words as he was placed in the chair were, take it easy and do it properly. I'm in no hurry.
00:33:40The generator attached to the chair was charged with 1000 volts, which was thought to be enough to induce immediate unconsciousness and cardiac arrest.
00:33:50This current was applied to Kemmler for 17 seconds, after which he was pronounced dead.
00:33:57However, witnesses pointed out that he was still breathing.
00:34:01Kemmler was quickly examined by two physicians who confirmed he was still alive, and the call was made for the current to be switched back on.
00:34:10This time, 2000 volts were applied.
00:34:13Blood vessels under Kemmler's skin ruptured and bled, and some witnesses claimed his body caught fire.
00:34:20A reporter for the New York Times later wrote,
00:34:24An awful odour began to permeate the death chamber, and then, as though to cap the climax of this fearful sight,
00:34:32it was seen that the hair under and around the electrode on the head, and the flesh under and around the electrode at the base of the spine, was singeing.
00:34:41The stench was unbearable.
00:34:43When it was finally over, the execution had lasted for eight minutes, and was widely considered to have been far more cruel and unpleasant than the use of hanging.
00:34:54The electric chair, not humane at all.
00:34:58In my opinion, an extremely inhumane form of execution, that I still believe is being done in America, in some states, to this day.
00:35:08The electric chair, not the electric chair, is being done in America.
00:35:24Whilst often cruel and merciless, institutions throughout history that have wielded the power to legally take the life of a human being,
00:35:33have done so either in times of war or in response to capital crimes, such as rape and murder.
00:35:41But when a government decides to take control of the justice system and use it for political ends,
00:35:47simply holding the wrong opinion or even just being in the wrong place at the wrong time
00:35:52can result in imprisonment, torture and execution.
00:35:57The Iron Curtain, a term first used by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946,
00:36:03referred to the area of Russia and Eastern Europe that came under Communist Soviet control after the Second World War.
00:36:12The Soviets came to power in Russia in 1917,
00:36:16in the midst of a workers' revolt and a violent coup against the Russian monarchy.
00:36:21In the century prior to the revolution, approximately 6,000 death sentences were handed down,
00:36:28due to a person's political beliefs or activities.
00:36:31And so, during the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies,
00:36:38the new Soviet government decreed the abolition of the death penalty.
00:36:43However, it was quickly reinstated just a few months later,
00:36:47and by the end of the following year,
00:36:50the Soviet regime had already executed more than 15,000 people,
00:36:54and they were just getting started.
00:36:58During the 1920s, the Russian secret police were actually issued with quotas
00:37:03to determine how many people were to be arrested and executed,
00:37:08regardless of any actual criminal activity.
00:37:11We are talking of hundreds of thousands of people.
00:37:14Stalin, I mean, had the Polish aristocracy and officer class completely obliterated.
00:37:23During Stalin's great purge of the 1930s,
00:37:27720,000 people were executed,
00:37:31often after highly publicised show trials,
00:37:35at which they were forced to confess to various political crimes.
00:37:41In fact, the confessions came only after weeks of torture,
00:37:45including beatings and simulated drowning.
00:37:51By comparison, the method of execution employed,
00:37:55a gunshot to the head,
00:37:56was at least less cruel than under many earlier regimes.
00:38:00However, the Soviets had other ways of ensuring the death of their enemies.
00:38:06By the time of Stalin's death in 1953,
00:38:10approximately 5 million people per year
00:38:13were being sentenced to the Gulag,
00:38:15a series of forced labour camps,
00:38:17where a slow death from cold, overwork, torture or starvation
00:38:22was often the outcome.
00:38:25Many more millions were starved
00:38:27as a result of deliberately engineered food shortages and famines,
00:38:31bypassing the justice system altogether.
00:38:35By the time of the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989,
00:38:40it is now known that tens of millions
00:38:42had been put to death by the regime,
00:38:45a figure that is only matched
00:38:47by the equally horrific rule of Chairman Mao Zedong in China.
00:38:54After a period of civil war,
00:38:57the formation of the People's Republic of China
00:39:00was announced by Mao Zedong
00:39:02on the 1st of October, 1949.
00:39:05Having received considerable support
00:39:08in the year prior from the Soviet Union,
00:39:11Mao adopted a Soviet-style approach to leadership.
00:39:15As in the Soviet Union,
00:39:17show trials took place,
00:39:19at which convicts were publicly denounced
00:39:21before being taken away for execution
00:39:24by way of a bullet to the back of the head.
00:39:29However, such was the political fervour at these trials,
00:39:33tensions sometimes ran so high
00:39:35that the condemned person was beaten to death
00:39:38by an angry mob
00:39:39before the formal execution could be carried out.
00:39:43Mao Zedong was himself a fervent believer
00:39:46in the use of capital punishment
00:39:47against political opponents.
00:39:50It is absolutely necessary and legitimate
00:39:53to sentence to death
00:39:55by the People's Court and the democratic government
00:39:58criminals who actively and grievously oppose
00:40:01the People's Democratic Revolution.
00:40:03Indeed, unlike in virtually every other society in history,
00:40:08it was political crimes and only political crimes
00:40:12that Mao considered worthy of the death penalty.
00:40:16The rule of law itself was effectively suspended
00:40:19during the Cultural Revolution,
00:40:21wherein people were encouraged to attack and destroy
00:40:24any remnants of the old pre-revolutionary China.
00:40:29Hundreds of thousands of people have been exterminated.
00:40:34Whilst the thousands of deaths
00:40:37may not have been recorded as official executions,
00:40:40the use of such violence was explicitly encouraged,
00:40:44most famously by the publication of Mao's Little Red Book,
00:40:48a collection of quotes from Mao Zedong.
00:40:51Every communist must grasp the truth.
00:40:54Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
00:40:59People were killed en masse at political rallies
00:41:01and, as in the Soviet Union,
00:41:04forced labour camps and engineered food shortages
00:41:07caused many more millions of deaths.
00:41:10This period in China's history
00:41:12has proved to be the deadliest of anywhere in the world,
00:41:16with an estimated 65 million people
00:41:19having lost their lives through the action of the regime.
00:41:23But perhaps the most horrific abuse
00:41:25of the power of the state over life and death
00:41:28was seen in Cambodia,
00:41:30where the communist revolution led by Pol Pot
00:41:33resulted in one quarter of the entire population
00:41:36being put to death.
00:41:40Pol Pot, who was introduced to communist theory
00:41:42while studying in France,
00:41:44took control of Cambodia in 1976
00:41:47and immediately began brutalising the population
00:41:51with his Khmer Rouge army.
00:41:55Pol Pot in Cambodia,
00:41:58he created this idea of doing away with industrialisation completely.
00:42:03The country's cities were forcibly evacuated
00:42:06with the stated intent of creating a new agrarian society
00:42:11in the countryside.
00:42:12But the result was two million deaths.
00:42:16The Khmer Rouge regime executed anyone
00:42:18whom it suspected of having connections
00:42:20with the former Cambodian government,
00:42:23as well as professionals,
00:42:24intellectuals, Buddhists and other minorities.
00:42:27Just wearing a pair of glasses
00:42:29could cause you to be executed
00:42:33because they thought you might have been
00:42:34a more intelligent person.
00:42:38It was also considered necessary
00:42:39to execute not only the suspected dissident,
00:42:43but often their entire family as well.
00:42:46Pol Pot himself said,
00:42:48if you want to kill the grass,
00:42:50you also have to kill the roots.
00:42:55Whilst the Khmer Rouge initially sought
00:42:57to imitate their Soviet predecessors
00:43:00by carrying out executions via a gunshot
00:43:03to the back of the head,
00:43:04the relative poverty of Cambodia as a nation
00:43:07meant that they simply could not afford
00:43:09the cost of the bullets required to do so.
00:43:14Those intended to be put to death
00:43:16were therefore simply struck on the back of the head
00:43:19and thrown into shallow ditches
00:43:21in remote areas known as the killing fields.
00:43:24Even small children and babies were not spared
00:43:27and were smashed against trees
00:43:29before being thrown into the mass graves.
00:43:33Many prisoners were also subjected
00:43:35to hideous torture and medical experiments,
00:43:38which were so horrific
00:43:40that the prisoners tried in every way
00:43:42to commit suicide.
00:43:44The screams were said to be so loud
00:43:46that they had to be covered by loudspeakers
00:43:49playing propaganda music of the Khmer Rouge.
00:43:53Today, the site of the most notorious prison
00:43:56has been turned into a museum,
00:43:58where it is recorded that more than 20,000 people
00:44:02had been tortured and imprisoned there.
00:44:05This was just one of almost 200 similar prisons
00:44:08that existed throughout the country.
00:44:11More like ethnic cleansing, I think, than execution.
00:44:15We are talking of hundreds of thousands of people.
00:44:18By the end of the 20th century,
00:44:20it's widely believed that the communist regimes
00:44:23in power in the Soviet Union and elsewhere
00:44:26had together been responsible
00:44:28for the deaths of over 100 million people.
00:44:31As the 20th century progressed,
00:44:48more and more voices in the Western world
00:44:50began to question the legitimacy of capital punishment.
00:44:55Over the course of numerous individual acts of parliament,
00:44:58laws in the United Kingdom gradually changed.
00:45:02Whilst the public overwhelmingly supported
00:45:05the use of the death penalty in cases of murder,
00:45:08a number of miscarriages of justice during the 1950s
00:45:12strengthened the case for abolition.
00:45:14The Homicide Act of 1957
00:45:17attempted to create two different classifications of murder,
00:45:21those which were capital crimes
00:45:23and those which were not.
00:45:25Capital punishment for murder
00:45:27was finally abolished completely
00:45:29by an Act of Parliament in 1965.
00:45:33When we abolished hanging in 1965,
00:45:36some people were against hanging,
00:45:39some people were for hanging.
00:45:41But the interesting thing is
00:45:43that from 1965 until 2001,
00:45:49the amount of murders that took place
00:45:51in this country doubled.
00:45:52Capital punishment did remain
00:45:55for a small number of very specific crimes,
00:45:58causing a fire or explosion in a naval dockyard,
00:46:02spying in ships of the Royal Navy,
00:46:05piracy with violence and treason.
00:46:09Surprisingly, until 1973,
00:46:12the official punishment for the crime of treason
00:46:15was death by beheading,
00:46:17although this was never actually carried out.
00:46:19All remaining capital offences,
00:46:23including treason,
00:46:25were finally removed from law in the late 1990s
00:46:28by the Tony Blair government,
00:46:31bringing the UK into alignment with much of Europe.
00:46:35As of the present day,
00:46:38capital punishment is banned
00:46:39in all members of the European Union.
00:46:42Whilst Russia retains capital crimes in law,
00:46:46no executions have taken place there since the 1990s.
00:46:50In all of Europe,
00:46:52only Belarus actively retains the death penalty,
00:46:56where it is carried out by shooting.
00:46:59Even in the United States of America,
00:47:01the death penalty today is seldom used,
00:47:04with the number of executions per year
00:47:06having reduced from 85 in the year 2000
00:47:10to just 24 in the year 2023.
00:47:14The vast majority of these
00:47:16were carried out by lethal injection.
00:47:20The idea of using an injection of lethal chemicals
00:47:24to cause an immediate death
00:47:26was first proposed in the late 1800s
00:47:29by New York doctor Julius Mount Blair,
00:47:33writing in the Medico-Legal Journal.
00:47:34However, lethal injection as a method of execution
00:47:39was not adopted in law until 1977.
00:47:45Despite the straightforward-sounding name,
00:47:48death by lethal injection
00:47:49is a relatively complex process.
00:47:53One of the problems is, of course,
00:47:55is because a doctor can't do it
00:47:57because they'll be breaking the Hippocratic Oath.
00:48:00So it's left to some form of prison official to do it
00:48:03and an awful lot of those that are executed
00:48:06in America these days, of course,
00:48:09are taking drugs intravenously
00:48:11and they can't find a vein.
00:48:14And even sometimes the condemned man
00:48:17is actually helping the prison official
00:48:19to find a vein.
00:48:22The process begins with the condemned person
00:48:25having two intravenous cannulas inserted,
00:48:28one in each arm.
00:48:30A saline drip is then started in both arms
00:48:32to ensure that the lines are not blocked
00:48:34and a heart monitor is attached to the inmate.
00:48:38The lethal chemicals are then added to the IV
00:48:40in a specific order
00:48:42to first induce unconsciousness
00:48:44followed by death through paralysis
00:48:47of the respiratory muscles
00:48:48or by cardiac arrest.
00:48:51The chemical combination used
00:48:53begins with sodium pyothentol,
00:48:56which normally causes unconsciousness
00:48:57within 30 seconds.
00:49:00This is followed by pancuronium bromide,
00:49:03a muscle relaxant which causes paralysis
00:49:05of the diaphragm,
00:49:07sufficient to cause death by asphyxiation.
00:49:10Finally, potassium chloride to stop the heart,
00:49:13resulting in death by cardiac arrest.
00:49:16This normally occurs within minutes,
00:49:18though there have been recorded cases
00:49:20where the entire process took more than an hour.
00:49:23I don't understand why they have such a problem
00:49:26because when your animal is put to sleep,
00:49:28they give it an injection
00:49:29and it goes to sleep
00:49:32and then they give an injection
00:49:33that kills it.
00:49:34But for some reason,
00:49:35they never seem,
00:49:36or sometimes don't seem,
00:49:37to get the mixture right.
00:49:40Some opponents to the technique
00:49:42point out that once the muscle relaxant
00:49:44has been administered,
00:49:46there is no way to tell
00:49:47if the initial dose of sodium pyothentol
00:49:49has actually fully induced unconsciousness.
00:49:52Since the muscle relaxant causes paralysis,
00:49:56it may be that the inmate suffers great pain
00:49:59during the administering of potassium chloride,
00:50:01but is simply unable to express their discomfort.
00:50:06In other parts of the world,
00:50:08capital punishment is still very much on the agenda.
00:50:12In the Islamic world,
00:50:13the Quran specifies the death penalty
00:50:15for a large number of crimes.
00:50:18An Amnesty International report from 2020
00:50:21calculated that almost 90% of all the world's executions
00:50:25took place in either Iran, Iraq, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.
00:50:31Death by decapitation is the form of execution
00:50:34most associated with Islamic law,
00:50:36although surprisingly,
00:50:38it is not explicitly called for in the Quran,
00:50:41although some scholars cite a reference
00:50:43to smiting the necks of enemies.
00:50:46Currently, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world
00:50:50which uses decapitation within its Islamic legal system.
00:50:54The majority of executions carried out by the Wahhabi government
00:50:57are public beheadings,
00:50:59which usually draw large crowds,
00:51:02but are not allowed to be photographed or filmed.
00:51:04Outside of the Islamic world,
00:51:08the largest number of executions carried out today
00:51:11by a single nation
00:51:12take place in the People's Republic of China.
00:51:16Unlike the chaos of the Mao era,
00:51:19modern China has a rigorous justice system.
00:51:23Whilst some political crimes remain capital offences,
00:51:26added to the list are more typical crimes,
00:51:29including arson, rape of a minor, and drug trafficking.
00:51:34Capital punishment in China
00:51:35can be imposed on crimes
00:51:37against national symbols and treasures,
00:51:40such as theft of cultural relics,
00:51:43and even the killing of giant pandas.
00:51:48Elsewhere in Southeast Asia,
00:51:50capital punishment remains in use,
00:51:52particularly for drugs-related offences,
00:51:55in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
00:51:57Japan retains the death penalty
00:52:00for aggravated murder
00:52:01and utilises the long-drop method of hanging.
00:52:07Despite its abolition many decades ago,
00:52:10popular opinion in Europe
00:52:12remains generally in favour of capital punishment,
00:52:15although only by a small margin.
00:52:17I think the last poll they had,
00:52:19I believe 59% of the population of this country
00:52:23believed that some form of death penalty
00:52:27should be reintroduced.
00:52:29Those in favour of its reintroduction
00:52:32normally refer to the fact that fear of execution
00:52:35acts as the strongest possible deterrent.
00:52:39I support the death penalty because I believe,
00:52:42if administered swiftly and justly,
00:52:45capital punishment is a deterrent
00:52:47against future violence
00:52:49and will save other innocent lives.
00:52:51Perhaps the most emotional argument
00:52:55in favour of the death penalty,
00:52:57particularly in cases of murder,
00:52:59is that the perpetrator simply deserves such a punishment.
00:53:04An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
00:53:07as the famous biblical quote has it.
00:53:09I personally have always voted for the death penalty
00:53:15because I believe that people who go out
00:53:18prepared to take the lives of other people
00:53:20forfeit their own right to live.
00:53:26A society that is not willing to demand a life
00:53:30of somebody who has taken somebody else's life
00:53:32is simply immoral.
00:53:38As we have seen,
00:53:40the justice systems of many ancient societies
00:53:43were founded on exactly this basis.
00:53:46And in all of human history,
00:53:48the move towards abolishing the death penalty
00:53:50in much of the world
00:53:52represents a tiny fragment of time.
00:53:55It was only a few short decades ago,
00:53:58within the lifetime of many people still alive today,
00:54:01that millions of people were being executed
00:54:04by regimes that some in the West praised
00:54:07and still defend today.
00:54:10I personally believe that
00:54:13some form of death sentence
00:54:15should be administered
00:54:16for the murder of children,
00:54:20murder of policemen
00:54:21and premeditated murder.
00:54:24You bought the gun,
00:54:25you loaded it with six bullets
00:54:26and you pulled the trigger five times.
00:54:28You meant to do it.
00:54:29Could it be that capital punishment
00:54:33will make a return to Western Europe?
00:54:37In light of the growing discontent
00:54:39with the apparent acquiescence to lawlessness
00:54:42currently being felt in many European capitals,
00:54:46it may be a question not of if,
00:54:50but of when.
00:54:51The End
00:54:53The End
00:54:53The End
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