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00:01:42In a world without modern societal structures such as criminal courts and prisons, the biblical
00:01:50notion of an eye for an eye was seen as suitable punishment for a perpetrator and compensation
00:01:56for the victim. As more complex societies developed, so did the methods of execution,
00:02:05some designed to be swift and efficient, but many others deliberately crafted to prolong
00:02:11the experience as much as possible, for the dual purpose of inflicting the maximum amount
00:02:16of suffering whilst providing the most gruesome entertainment to onlookers.
00:02:23Today much of the world has now outlawed capital punishment. What was once seen as God's will
00:02:29and righteous justice now seems cruel and inhumane to the eyes of many. Modern societies like
00:02:37to think of themselves as more enlightened than those of the distant past, but as we shall
00:02:42see, it is humanity's recent past that demonstrates most terribly how the state's power to end
00:02:50the lives of those seen as criminals can be abused.
00:03:09The 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
00:03:21convicted criminal was to be put to death. Richard Felix is a paranormal historian, television presenter,
00:03:30and author.
00:03:31Richard Felix is a paranormal historian, television presenter, and author.
00:03:34The earliest record that I know of is in Babylon, when they actually created 25 different offences that you could be executed for.
00:03:42For burglary, the convict would be hung from a gibbet constructed at the site where the crime took place.
00:03:49For 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, it was entirely legal to force him back inside the burning building to Suffolk.
00:04:11Even lesser crimes could result in horrific punishments, often involving the brutal severing of a body part.
00:04:23Ancient 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 scaphism.
00:04:35They actually put you in a boat, another boat upside down on top of you, put 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.
00:04:56They keep his face continually turned towards the sun, and it becomes completely covered up and hidden by the multitude of flies that settle on it.
00:05:06When the man is manifestly dead, the uppermost boat being taken off, they find his flesh devoured.
00:05:16Ancient 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, and the sentences could be as barbaric as any in the ancient world.
00:05:32Mutilation and flogging were common punishments for minor offences, and for capital crimes execution could be carried out by beheading, being buried alive, drowned, impaled, or even being fed to crocodiles.
00:05:47In Southeast Asian territories, slow slicing, otherwise known as death by a thousand cuts, was 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.
00:06:07They 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.
00:06:20If that one said breast, then off came the breast.
00:06:23And they continued for hours and hours cutting small pieces of flesh.
00:06:29And 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.
00:06:37Families of the person that was going to be executed would sometimes bribe the executioner so 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.
00:07:06They would train an elephant, of course, to not necessarily stand straight on the heart, but 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 and 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, he twines his trunk round the person and stake,
00:07:49and pulling the stake from the ground with great violence, tosses the man and the stake into the air.
00:07:55And in coming down, receives him on his teeth, and making him off again, puts one of his forefeet on the carcass and squeezes it flat.
00:08:05One of the more conventional and certainly most well-known methods of capital punishment used in the ancient world was crucifixion.
00:08:15Whilst most commonly associated with the death of Jesus Christ,
00:08:20the 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, is said to have crucified 2,000 survivors from his siege of the Phoenician city of Tyre in 332 BC.
00:08:45By 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,
00:09:04and 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, because you would die quicker of unconsciousness.
00:09:21Roman philosopher Seneca the Young once observed,
00:09:24I 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.
00:09:37The 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.
00:09:57As 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,
00:10:50some 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.
00:11:01Such cruelty was not without controversy, even at the time.
00:11:05Celebrated Roman philosopher Cicero described it as a most cruel and disgusting punishment.
00:11:11He famously wrote,
00:11:13It is a crime to bind a Roman citizen. To scourge him is a wickedness. To put him to death is almost parasite.
00:11:23What shall I say of crucifying him? So guilty an action cannot by any possibility
00:11:29be adequately expressed by any name bad enough for it.
00:11:34Over the centuries, as empires fell and nations warred, methods of torture and execution became ever more cruel and imaginative.
00:12:01and imaginative. In Europe, during the Middle Ages, the death penalty was commonly used
00:12:07as a punishment even for minor offences. Execution by breaking the body over a wheel was a technique
00:12:15first explored by the Romans. They fixed the prisoner about a great wheel, whereof the
00:12:22noble-hearted youth had all his joints dislocated and all his limbs broken. The whole wheel was
00:12:29stained with his blood. However, use of the breaking wheel as it was to become known was
00:12:37popularized 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. You were taken to the
00:12:52execution on a cart, but 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. They would
00:13:07then pour either boiling oil or sulphur, sometimes boiling lead, into the wound. They would then
00:13:16strap you to a wheel and break you. And that's smashing your bones, starting with the ankle,
00:13:24the shin, the knee, the thigh. Then the same with the next leg. Then one arm, the wrist, the shoulder,
00:13:33then the next arm. This could take as long as the executioner wanted to take it. And then the coup de
00:13:40grace would be a blow to the chest. This 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, which was then raised
00:13:54up on a pole or mast, ready for a slow and agonizing death, not unlike a crucifixion.
00:14:00Eventually, the body was burnt and your ashes scattered to the wind.
00:14:06The fear of witchcraft that spread throughout Europe and early American settlers proved another
00:14:14source of victims for those that delighted in the most cruel of punishments. Thou shalt not
00:14:21permit a sorceress to live. Between 1400 and 1775, approximately 100,000 people were tried and prosecuted
00:14:34for witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies. Around half of these were executed.
00:14:40You had to prove they were a witch, which was a bit difficult. So they were stripped naked to search
00:14:48for the devil's mark, a birthmark, a wart. If none of those things happened, then it was up to God to
00:14:54decide. Trial by ordeal. They tied your left toe to your right thumb, your left thumb to your right toe,
00:15:01rope round you and threw you in the pond. If you sank to the bottom, you were innocent. If you rose to the
00:15:10surface, as most people did, you were a witch. Under the law of Queen Elizabeth, witchcraft was a criminal
00:15:18offence, a hanging offence. The most common form of execution for those convicted of witchcraft was to
00:15:25be burnt at the stake, where the condemned was tied to a large wooden stake and a fire lit under them,
00:15:32resulting in a protracted and agonising death. Sometimes the executioner would tie a rope round
00:15:39the neck and pull on the rope and strangle them as the flames were getting higher, but often they were
00:15:46burnt alive. In some cases, as a small act of mercy, a container of gunpowder was attached to the victim,
00:15:55which would explode once heated by the fire, killing them instantly.
00:15:59There is just one European leader who is remembered to this day more for his preferred manner of
00:16:08execution than for any other achievement. Vlad Dracula, better known as Vlad the Impaler, ruled
00:16:16Romania during the 15th century, and stories of his immense cruelty circulated far and wide, both during his life and after
00:16:25his death in 1476. With the invention of the printing press, books detailing his exploits, together with lurid drawings,
00:16:34were bestsellers of the time. Vlad had a big copper cauldron built and put a lid made of wood with holes
00:16:42in it on top. He 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 and let the people cry their eyes out until they
00:16:55were boiled to death. He 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. They would hoist them onto it and then leave them there as they slipped down the pole
00:17:21until it came out of all different parts of the body, sometimes even the mouth. This was a vile,
00:17:30disgusting form of execution. He ordered that women be impaled together with their suckling babies on the
00:17:37same steak. The babies fought for their lives at their mother's breasts until they died. Then he
00:17:44had the women's breasts cut off and put the babies inside head first. Thus he had them impaled together.
00:17:52It was said that even after his eventual defeat and imprisonment, Vlad took to capturing rats in his
00:17:58prison cell and impaling them on scraps of wood. To be hanged, drawn and quartered was possibly the
00:18:06bloodiest method of execution carried out in Britain and Ireland during the middle ages.
00:18:13The whole thing was symbolic. It was a form of torture, even though torture was illegal in England,
00:18:20but it was to make you suffer and it was to send you to hell. Possibly the most gruesome punishment ever
00:18:27devised, it was reserved for those found guilty of high treason. The sentence for a traitor was
00:18:34that you'd be taken from this jail and dragged backwards to a place of execution. Backwards,
00:18:42because what you'd thought up treason was unnatural. There you'll be hanged between heaven and earth,
00:18:49not fit to inhabit either. We're talking of slow strangulation. So after two or three minutes,
00:18:54you would still be alive. You'd be taken down, laid on a drawing, quartering and beheading block,
00:19:02which is a butcher's block for human beings. Your privy parts cut off,
00:19:06and burn before your eyes. Your bowels and entrails to be ripped out of your belly because of the inward
00:19:17treacherous thoughts that you'd had. Treason. A good executioner would get you disemboweled,
00:19:23all 37 feet, small intestine, while you're still alive and conscious.
00:19:33Your head to be severed from your body because your head had thought up the treacherous thoughts
00:19:40and your body divided into four equal quarters, and those quarters to be at the disposal of whatever
00:19:48monarch was on the throne at the time.
00:19:50All of this would take place in public, before a baying crowd, and in the case of multiple executions,
00:19:59convicts would be forced to watch the disembowelment of their fellow inmates before it was done to them.
00:20:05Finally, the convict was beheaded and put on display as a gruesome warning to others.
00:20:12In some cases, the head would be pickled in a jar, in an attempt to ensure the face remained recognizable.
00:20:20Although this most extreme form of punishment was not used routinely, and was reserved only for
00:20:27cases of high treason, there are many examples of its use that are still remembered to this day,
00:20:34such as the execution of Scottish knight Sir William Wallace.
00:20:39When 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.
00:20:56Members of the English nobility convicted of wrongdoing faced a punishment more in keeping
00:21:02with 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.
00:21:26He'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.
00:21:33Now, he would be nervous, and of course there's one very good way of calming your nerves down before an execution,
00:21:40and that's alcohol. So the chances of taking a head off in one blow was very remote.
00:21:46It took three blows to take off the head of Mary, Queen of Scots,
00:21:51and five blows to take off the head of the Duke of Monmouth.
00:21:55After the fourth blow, the body was still moving, and Monmouth was still alive.
00:22:02In order to avoid such suffering, it was customary for the condemned person to pay their executioner a tip.
00:22:09The more generous the payment, it was hoped, the swifter the death would be.
00:22:14Lawrence Shirley, the fourth Earl Ferrars, who'd murdered his bailiff,
00:22:20when he gave his purse of gold or silver, he handed it to the assistant executioner
00:22:26instead of the executioner, and there was a punch-up on the scaffold.
00:22:32Across the channel in France, the heading was seen as much more of a skilled profession.
00:22:37In France, they did it with a sword, and you had to kneel down with your neck up,
00:22:45and the executioner would swing and take the head off like that.
00:22:50One of the most celebrated French executioners was Charles-Henri Sanson.
00:22:57Sanson was the royal executioner during the reign of King Louis XVI,
00:23:02and was the fourth in a sixth-generation family dynasty of executioners.
00:23:06The Sanson family, there were seven members of the Sanson family, all became executioners.
00:23:14It was passed down sometimes from father to son, from uncle to nephew.
00:23:20During his lifetime, Sanson personally executed almost 3,000 people.
00:23:28On one occasion, he was called upon to execute a young nobleman for the crime of blasphemy.
00:23:35Regarding Jean-Francois Lefebvre, chevalier de la barre, we declare him convicted of having taught to sing
00:23:42and sung impious, execrable and blasphemous songs against God, and of having profaned the sign of
00:23:50the cross in making blessings accompanied by foul words.
00:23:54He was a young man, and he obviously had to kneel. And Sanson said,
00:24:03Sir, will you kneel? And he said, I am an aristocrat. I will not kneel. And he remained standing.
00:24:09Sanson took one blow and went straight through the neck. The body continued to stand with the head
00:24:18still on the neck. Sanson looked at him and said, shake yourself, it's done. And then the head rolled off
00:24:26and the body crumpled onto the floor.
00:24:32In the 18th century, the idea that the condemned man should be forced to suffer as much as possible
00:24:50began to be replaced by a drive for sheer efficiency.
00:24:55When the French Revolution came, a very famous executioner called Henry Sanson,
00:25:00who beheaded people with a sword, realized that if he was going to have to execute
00:25:05all these clerics, religious people, aristocrats, he'd need a lot of swords.
00:25:12Luckily, a gentleman of the National Assembly, Dr. Ignatius Guillotine, came up with a,
00:25:19what he believed to be, a humane form of execution, the guillotine.
00:25:25The guillotine was praised for its efficiency. An efficiency that allowed for an astonishing
00:25:3317,000 executions to take place in the course of just one revolutionary year.
00:25:38When they originally designed it, it had a crescent shaped blade and that wasn't efficient enough
00:25:50because that actually crushed the neck before it took the head off. And would you believe
00:25:56Louis XVI, he was a bit of an engineer and he had a look at the guillotine when it was first being made
00:26:02and realized that it would be far better to have a blade at an angle of 45 degrees, which would slice
00:26:09through the neck quickly. He was one of the first people executed on the guillotine.
00:26:17There is some evidence to suggest that death by guillotine may not be as quick and painless as may appear.
00:26:24There was a lot of discussion and debate about whether the brain continued to function after
00:26:32the head had been taken off. In 1905, a doctor bureau got permission to stand by the guillotine
00:26:42when a chap called Longville was beheaded. I was able to note immediately after the decapitation,
00:26:48the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five
00:26:55or six seconds. The doctor waited a few seconds and then shouted, Longville! I called in a strong,
00:27:05sharp voice, Longville! I saw the eyelids slowly lift up with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.
00:27:13Next, Longville's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.
00:27:21I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.
00:27:28Though it remains most famous as a device connected to the French Revolution and the 1700s,
00:27:34the guillotine remained as the official method of execution in France well into modern times and was
00:27:41still in use in the 1970s. In England in the year 1810, Sir Samuel Romilly stated in the British
00:27:51Parliament that there was no country on the face of the earth in which there have been so many
00:27:57different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England.
00:28:04Over the course of the next century, this was to change, with vast numbers of minor crimes being
00:28:10removed from the list of capital offences. Public executions ceased in 1868, not because the public
00:28:18appetite for them had diminished, but because many influential figures at the time saw that they had
00:28:24become little more than an entertainment, often accompanied by the selling of alcohol.
00:28:30Charles Dickens wrote in a letter to the Times newspaper,
00:28:34I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonker Lane this morning. I believe that a sight so
00:28:41inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this
00:28:48morning could be imagined by no man. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought the
00:28:54wretched murderers to it faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing of the assembled spectators.
00:29:02It would be like a day at the fair. There'd be pie sellers, people selling a programme of your trial
00:29:10and life to read about you as you were dangling at the end of a rope. There'd be pickpockets there,
00:29:16riots, people would be drunk. It came from higher up. This was too popular. We must stop it.
00:29:24With the end of public executions, the need for especially cruel and gruesome punishments was also at an end.
00:29:32Death by beheading and quartering was officially abolished in 1870. All executions for the rest of
00:29:39the 19th century were to be carried out by hanging. In each town there would be a county gallows which
00:29:47would be a football goal and then there would be one ladder, sometimes two ladders. You would go up one
00:29:54ladder, the rope would be fixed round your neck, the execution would be up the other ladder,
00:29:59fixing it. He'd come down and then he would turn you off, as it was called, turning you off the ladder
00:30:05and you died of slow strangulation. Before 1850, the short drop was the standard method of hanging.
00:30:13Thanks to the work of Irish doctor Samuel Horton, the short drop was superseded in the second half of
00:30:20the century by what came to be known as the standard drop.
00:30:24It was a platform with a lever and a trap door. When the trap door opened and you dropped through,
00:30:32it would sever between the second and third vertebrae, bringing about, hopefully, an instantaneous death.
00:30:39However, the standard drop was no guarantee of a quick death. Famous examples of the failure of this
00:30:46technique include the execution of convicted US Civil War criminal Henry Wurtz. Wurtz was hanged in
00:30:54November 1865, watched by a crowd of spectators, but the drop failed to break his neck. Spectators were
00:31:03forced to watch as Wurtz was slowly strangled over the course of 20 minutes. The standard drop was
00:31:10later superseded by the long drop, developed by William Marwood, himself a practicing executioner.
00:31:17The exact height of the drop varied depending on the height of the convict,
00:31:22from as little as four feet to as much as eight feet. William Marwood, clever as he was,
00:31:27at the beginning, he only measured the victim. He didn't weigh them. So a man of five foot seven
00:31:35and 12 stone got the same drop as a man of five foot seven and 20 stone. The danger with using the
00:31:42long drop technique was that if there was a miscalculation, the results could be horrific.
00:31:49American outlaw Tom Ketram, known by the nickname Black Jack, was executed for train robbery using the
00:31:57long drop technique in 1901. Ketchum's weight was measured when he was taken into custody,
00:32:03but was not re-measured prior to his execution, despite significant weight gain during his time in
00:32:10jail. The extra weight was therefore not taken into account when the drop was calculated for his
00:32:16execution. As Ketchum dropped with the noose around his neck, the force was so violent that his head was
00:32:23torn from his spine, an image that was captured by a photographer.
00:32:30This and other such incidents caused many United States authorities to look at alternative methods
00:32:36of execution. The electric chair, which was to become synonymous with executions in the United States,
00:32:44was 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
00:32:59victim's head and leg. After a variety of tests on animals, authorities and experts remained unsure as
00:33:06to the precise current of electricity that was required to bring about instant death. The first official
00:33:14execution by electric chair was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a gruesome affair. William Francis Kemmler was
00:33:21convicted of killing his common-law wife Tilly Zeigler in 1889, and his execution was to be carried out by
00:33:29electric chair on the 6th of August 1890. Kemmler's last words as he was placed in the chair were,
00:33:36take it easy and do it properly. I'm in no hurry. The generator attached to the chair was charged with
00:33:441000 volts, which was thought to be enough to induce immediate unconsciousness and cardiac arrest.
00:33:52This 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. Kemmler was quickly examined by two
00:34:04physicians who confirmed he was still alive, and the call was made for the current to be switched
00:34:09back on. This time, 2000 volts were applied. Blood vessels under Kemmler's skin ruptured and bled,
00:34:18and some witnesses claimed his body caught fire. A reporter for the New York Times later wrote,
00:34:25An awful odour began to permeate the death chamber, and then, as though to cap the climax of this
00:34:31fearful sight, it was seen that the hair under and around the electrode on the head, and the flesh
00:34:38under and around the electrode at the base of the spine, was singeing. The stench was unbearable.
00:34:45When it was finally over, the execution had lasted for eight minutes, and was widely considered to have
00:34:51been far more cruel and unpleasant than the use of hanging. The electric chair, not humane at all.
00:34:59In my opinion, an extremely inhumane form of execution, that I still believe is being done in
00:35:05America in some states to this day.
00:35:24Whilst often cruel and merciless, institutions throughout history that have wielded the power
00:35:31to legally take the life of a human being, have done so either in times of war, or in response
00:35:37to capital crimes, such as rape and murder. But when a government decides to take control of the
00:35:44justice system and use it for political ends, simply holding the wrong opinion, or even just
00:35:50being in the wrong place at the wrong time, can result in imprisonment, torture and execution.
00:35:56The Iron Curtain, a term first used by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946, referred to the area of Russia
00:36:05and Eastern Europe that came under Communist Soviet control after the Second World War.
00:36:11The Soviets came to power in Russia in 1917, in the midst of a workers' revolt and a violent coup
00:36:19against the Russian monarchy. In the century prior to the revolution, approximately 6,000 death
00:36:26sentences were handed down, due to a person's political beliefs or activities. And so during the
00:36:33Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, the new Soviet government
00:36:40decreed the abolition of the death penalty. However, it was quickly reinstated just a few months later,
00:36:47and by the end of the following year, the Soviet regime had already executed more than 15,000 people,
00:36:55and they were just getting started. During the 1920s, the Russian secret police were actually issued with
00:37:03quotas to determine how many people were to be arrested and executed, regardless of any actual criminal activity.
00:37:11We are talking of hundreds of thousands of people. Stalin, I mean, had the Polish aristocracy and officer class completely obliterated.
00:37:22During Stalin's great purge of the 1930s, 720,000 people were executed, often after highly publicised
00:37:34show trials, at which they were forced to confess to various political crimes.
00:37:41In fact, the confessions came only after weeks of torture, including beatings and simulated drowning.
00:37:48By comparison, the method of execution employed, a gunshot to the head, was at least less cruel than under
00:37:58many earlier regimes. However, the Soviets had other ways of ensuring the death of their enemies.
00:38:06By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, approximately five million people per year were being sentenced to
00:38:14the Gulag, a series of forced labour camps, where a slow death from cold, overwork, torture or starvation
00:38:22was often the outcome. Many more millions were starved as a result of deliberately engineered food
00:38:29shortages and famines, bypassing the justice system altogether. By the time of the eventual collapse of
00:38:38the Soviet Union in 1989, it is now known that tens of millions had been put to death by the regime.
00:38:45A figure that is only matched by the equally horrific rule of Chairman Mao Zedong in China.
00:38:55After a period of civil war, the formation of the People's Republic of China was announced by
00:39:01Mao Zedong on the 1st of October 1949. Having received considerable support in the year prior from
00:39:09the Soviet Union, Mao adopted a Soviet-style approach to leadership. As in the Soviet Union, show trials took
00:39:18place, at which convicts were publicly denounced before being taken away for execution by way of a bullet to
00:39:25the back of the head. However, such was the political fervour at these trials, tensions sometimes ran so high
00:39:35that the condemned person was beaten to death by an angry mob before the formal execution could be carried out.
00:39:43Mao Zedong was himself a fervent believer in the use of capital punishment against political opponents.
00:39:49It is absolutely necessary and legitimate to sentence to death, by the People's Court and the Democratic
00:39:57Government, criminals who actively and grievously oppose the People's Democratic Revolution.
00:40:04Indeed, unlike in virtually every other society in history, it was political crimes, and only political
00:40:11crimes, that Mao considered worthy of the death penalty. The rule of law itself was effectively suspended
00:40:19during the Cultural Revolution, wherein people were encouraged to attack and destroy
00:40:24any remnants of the old, pre-revolutionary China. Hundreds of thousands of people have been
00:40:33exterminated. Whilst the thousands of deaths may not have been recorded as official executions,
00:40:40the use of such violence was explicitly encouraged, most famously by the publication of Mao's Little Red Book,
00:40:48a collection of quotes from Mao Zedong. Every communist must grasp the truth. Political power
00:40:56grows out of the barrel of a gun. People were killed en masse at political rallies, and as in the Soviet Union,
00:41:04forced labour camps and engineered food shortages caused many more millions of deaths. This period in
00:41:11China's history has proved to be the deadliest of anywhere in the world, with an estimated 65 million people
00:41:19having lost their lives through the action of the regime. But perhaps the most horrific abuse of the power
00:41:26power of the state over life and death was seen in Cambodia, where the communist revolution led by Pol Pot
00:41:33resulted in one quarter of the entire population being put to death. Pol Pot, who was introduced to communist
00:41:42theory while studying in France, took control of Cambodia in 1976, and immediately began brutalising the population
00:41:51with his Khmer Rouge army. Pol Pot in Cambodia, he created this idea of doing away with industrialisation
00:42:02completely. The country's cities were forcibly evacuated, with the stated intent of creating a new
00:42:09agrarian society in the countryside. But the result was two million deaths. The Khmer Rouge regime executed
00:42:18anyone whom it suspected of having connections with the former Cambodian government, as well as
00:42:23professionals, intellectuals, Buddhists and other minorities. Just wearing a pair of glasses could
00:42:30cause you to be executed, because they thought you might have been a more intelligent person.
00:42:38It was also considered necessary to execute not only the suspected dissident, but often their entire
00:42:44family as well. Pol Pot himself said, if you want to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots.
00:42:55Whilst the Khmer Rouge initially sought to imitate their Soviet predecessors by carrying out executions
00:43:02via a gunshot to the back of the head, the relative poverty of Cambodia as a nation meant that
00:43:08they simply could not afford the cost of the bullets required to do so. Those intended to be put to death
00:43:16were therefore simply struck on the back of the head and thrown into shallow ditches in remote areas
00:43:22known as the killing fields. Even small children and babies were not spared and were smashed against trees
00:43:29before being thrown into the mass graves. Many prisoners were also subjected to hideous torture and
00:43:37medical experiments, which were so horrific that the prisoners tried in every way to commit suicide.
00:43:44The screams were said to be so loud that they had to be covered by loud speakers playing propaganda
00:43:50the music of the Khmer Rouge. Today, the site of the most notorious prison has been turned into a museum,
00:43:59where it is recorded that more than 20,000 people had been tortured and imprisoned there.
00:44:05This was just one of almost 200 similar prisons that existed throughout the country.
00:44:11More like ethnic cleansing, I think, than execution. We are talking of hundreds of thousands of people.
00:44:18By the end of the 20th century, it's widely believed that the communist regimes in power in the Soviet Union and elsewhere
00:44:26had together been responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people.
00:44:31As the 20th century progressed, more and more voices in the Western world began to question the legitimacy of capital punishment.
00:44:53Over the course of numerous individual acts of Parliament, laws in the United Kingdom gradually changed.
00:45:02Whilst the public overwhelmingly supported the use of the death penalty in cases of murder,
00:45:07a number of miscarriages of justice during the 1950s strengthened the case for abolition.
00:45:15The Homicide Act of 1957 attempted to create two different classifications of murder,
00:45:21those which were capital crimes and those which were not.
00:45:26Capital punishment for murder was finally abolished completely by an Act of Parliament in 1965.
00:45:32When we abolished hanging in 1965, some people were against hanging, some people were for hanging.
00:45:41But the interesting thing is that from 1965 until 2001,
00:45:49the amount of murders that took place in this country doubled.
00:45:52Capital punishment did remain for a small number of very specific crimes, causing a fire or explosion in a naval dockyard,
00:46:02spying in ships of the Royal Navy, piracy with violence and treason.
00:46:09Surprisingly, until 1973, the official punishment for the crime of treason was death by beheading,
00:46:17although this was never actually carried out.
00:46:19All remaining capital offences, including treason, were finally removed from law in the late 1990s
00:46:28by the Tony Blair government, bringing the UK into alignment with much of Europe.
00:46:36As of the present day, capital punishment is banned in all members of the European Union.
00:46:43Whilst Russia retains capital crimes in law,
00:46:46no executions have taken place there since the 1990s.
00:46:51In all of Europe, only Belarus actively retains the death penalty, where it is carried out by shooting.
00:46:59Even in the United States of America, the death penalty today is seldom used,
00:47:04with the number of executions per year having reduced from 85 in the year 2000 to just 24 in the year 2023.
00:47:13The vast majority of these were carried out by lethal injection.
00:47:18The idea of using an injection of lethal chemicals to cause an immediate death was first proposed
00:47:27in the late 1800s by New York doctor Julius Mount Blair, writing in the Medico Legal Journal.
00:47:34However, lethal injection as a method of execution was not adopted in law until 1977.
00:47:45Despite the straightforward sounding name, death by lethal injection is a relatively complex process.
00:47:52One of the problems is, of course, is because a doctor can't do it,
00:47:57because they'll be breaking the Hippocratic oath. So it's left to some form of prison official to do it.
00:48:04And an awful lot of those that are executed in America these days, of course, are taking drugs
00:48:10intravenously and they can't find a vein. And even sometimes the condemned man is actually helping the
00:48:18prison official to find a vein. The process begins with the condemned person having two
00:48:26intravenous cannulas inserted, one in each arm. A saline drip is then started in both arms to ensure
00:48:33that the lines are not blocked and a heart monitor is attached to the inmate. The lethal chemicals are then
00:48:39added to the IV in a specific order, to first induce unconsciousness, followed by death through
00:48:46paralysis of the respiratory muscles or by cardiac arrest. The chemical combination used begins with
00:48:54sodium pyothentol, which normally causes unconsciousness within 30 seconds. This is followed
00:49:01by pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant which causes paralysis of the diaphragm, sufficient to cause
00:49:07death by asphyxiation. Finally potassium chloride to stop the heart, resulting in death by cardiac arrest.
00:49:16This normally occurs within minutes, though there have been recorded cases where the entire process
00:49:22took more than an hour. I don't understand why they have such a problem because when your animal
00:49:27is put to sleep, they give it an injection and it goes to sleep and then they give an injection
00:49:33that kills it. But for some reason they never seem, or sometimes don't seem to get the mixture right.
00:49:40Some opponents to the technique point out that once the muscle relaxant has been administered,
00:49:45there is no way to tell if the initial dose of sodium pyothentol has actually fully induced unconsciousness.
00:49:53Since the muscle relaxant causes paralysis, it may be that the inmate suffers great pain during the
00:49:59administering of potassium chloride, but is simply unable to express their discomfort.
00:50:06In other parts of the world, capital punishment is still very much on the agenda.
00:50:11In the Islamic world, the Quran specifies the death penalty for a large number of crimes.
00:50:18An Amnesty International report from 2020 calculated that almost 90% of all the world's executions
00:50:26took place in either Iran, Iraq, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Death by decapitation is the form of
00:50:33execution most associated with Islamic law, although surprisingly it is not explicitly called for in
00:50:40the Quran, although some scholars cite a reference to smiting the necks of enemies.
00:50:46Currently, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world which uses decapitation within its Islamic legal
00:50:53system. The majority of executions carried out by the Wahhabi government are public beheadings,
00:50:59which usually draw large crowds but are not allowed to be photographed or filmed.
00:51:06Outside of the Islamic world, the largest number of executions carried out today by a single nation
00:51:12take place in the People's Republic of China. Unlike the chaos of the Mao era, modern China has a rigorous
00:51:20justice system. Whilst some political crimes remain capital offences, added to the list are more
00:51:28typical crimes, including arson, rape of a minor and drug trafficking. Capital punishment in China
00:51:36can be imposed on crimes against national symbols and treasures, such as theft of cultural relics,
00:51:43and even the killing of giant pandas. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, capital punishment remains in use,
00:51:52particularly for drugs-related offences, in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Japan retains the death penalty
00:52:00for aggravated murder and utilises the long drop method of hanging. Despite its abolition many decades ago,
00:52:10popular opinion in Europe remains generally in favour of capital punishment, although only by a small
00:52:16margin. I think the last poll they had, I believe 59% of the population of this country believed that
00:52:25some form of death penalty should be reintroduced. Those in favour of its reintroduction normally refer to
00:52:33the fact that fear of execution acts as the strongest possible deterrent. I support the death penalty because
00:52:41I believe, if administered swiftly and justly, capital punishment is a deterrent against future violence
00:52:49and will save other innocent lives. Perhaps the most emotional argument in favour of the death penalty,
00:52:57particularly in cases of murder, is that the perpetrator simply deserves such a punishment. An eye for an eye,
00:53:05a tooth for a tooth, as the famous biblical quote has it.
00:53:11I personally have always voted for the death penalty, because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people,
00:53:19forfeit their own right to live. A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else's life is simply immoral.
00:53:33As we have seen, the justice systems of many ancient societies were founded on exactly this basis.
00:53:45And in all of human history, the move towards abolishing the death penalty in much of the world represents a tiny fragment of time.
00:53:55It was only a few short decades ago, within the lifetime of many people still alive today,
00:54:01that millions of people were being executed by regimes that some in the West praised and still defend today.
00:54:09I personally believe that some form of death sentence should be administered for the murder of children,
00:54:19murder of policemen and premeditated murder.
00:54:23You bought the gun, you loaded it with six bullets and you pulled the trigger five times.
00:54:27You meant to do it.
00:54:31Could it be that capital punishment will make a return to Western Europe?
00:54:37In light of the growing discontent with the apparent acquiescence to lawlessness currently being felt in many European capitals,
00:54:45it may be a question not of if, but of when.
00:55:15Have a few books!
00:55:17If you'd like the Вс assembling a loweressel force,
00:55:20you might need to be the most in-person,
00:55:22who did not reveal the rest of the recovery.
00:55:23If you're staying in the middle of the world,
00:55:25you'll always be able to and say by the end of life.
00:55:27I love no hovering.
00:55:29You're not buying a return to Western Europe.
00:55:31It's been a good thing for you,
00:55:33but I like the first.
00:55:34I think the as if you were going to be the best way or you,
00:55:36that's not valuable,
00:55:37you're going to be the best way to be the best.
00:55:39Make sure that we live in the world.
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