How Does the State Kill Its Citizens?

Capital punishment, or death penalty, has been practice for more than thousands of years.  Let us briefly see some of the common methods of execution that humankind has seen so far.

Used in ancient Greece from where it started and later on carried out too in such countries like Sweden, Russia, Germany, France and even in the colonial Louisiana, breaking on the wheelwas cruel method.  The wheel was a big wooden cart wheel with a lot of radial spokes.  The offenders were whipped to the wheel and repeatedly beaten with a club or iron stick; the gap in the wheel allowing the iron stick to smash through.  An alternative method was to spread-eagle the offenders and tied on a St. Andrew’s cross (that is, two wooden beams nailed in an X shape).  Following this, the offenders’ bodies will be displayed on the wheel.

Though not as common as other methods of punishment over the past two to three thousand years ago, a second method of capital punishment was by boiling (an offender) to death.  This was carried out by using a big caldron of water, tar, oil, or sometimes even the molten lead.  Sometimes the victim was put into the liquid before it was heated; at times, the offender might be put into the already boiling liquid.  Usually, it was head down first.  The executioner, by means of a big hook, would sink the offender deeper.  An alternative method was the use of a big thin container of tallow, oil or pitches.  The offender would be eventually be fried until he died.  This method was implemented in Europe and Asia.

An icon of Chinese brutality among the Westerners, a slow process of capital punishment is death by thousand cuts.  Slow slicing, transliterated as Ling Chi or Leng T’che in Mandarin), was effected in China from AD900 to its elimination in 1905.  Death of the offender was done by using a knife to slowly take away portions of the body — legs, chest, arms and limbs — over a long period of time.  The offender was tied on a wooden frame, and in public area as it was intended to bring about not only death but also embarassment.  Usually the final stab was into the heart.  But if the executioner was lenient, the first cut was direct to the throat — with the rest of the cuts merely serving as to cut up the corpse.