I’m confused.
How would having a longer length of rope result in decapitation?
mornea, with a longer rope, the condemned falls further, accelerating all the while. Since they are going faster at the end, there is more force applied to the neck.
mornea-
If the rope is too long, the person’s velocity can increase to the extent that there is enough force for the body to keep going while the head stays (at least for an instant) with the rope.
There are specific rope length charts based on the weight and body type of the condemned to ensure that the neck breaks but decapitation does not occur. Unfortunately my preliminary search did not yield the actual chart.
With the long drop method the sudden deceleration when the rope length is reached exerts force on the hanged person’s neck, at this moment momentum and gravity has an inevitably destructive effect on the relatively brittle part of the human body that is the neck. With a longer fall distance the body accelerates over a longer time and distance, hence it reaches more velocity and gains more momentum. In other words if the rope is too long the speed and weight of the falling body will tear the head off when the rope is suddenly stretched.
As for when this to not happen, the length should be so calculated that a complete severing of the nerve bundle above or at the fifth vertebrae is achieved. Since all the nerves that go into the body pass through here, all body functions cease immediately and unconsciousness is more or less instantaneous, clinical death including ceased brain function follows shortly. That is in the best of worlds of course. The fracture can occur below the fifth vertebrae, or be partial in nature, or it can as shown earlier fail completely. In this case the hanged person will suffocate slowly over about four to six minutes if the airways are completely blocked. Partial blocking of the airways will extend the time it takes to suffocate and is more likely to happen when the execution is effected by ‘roping up’.
See previous link for tables and calculations on all of the above.
This is quite a gruesome conversation topic, don’t you think?
Sparc
It’s in the link I posted earlier. Always follow the link. That’s why have links, so that you can follow them and learn more. It’s not just there to prove that we aren’t speaking out of our asses. Always follow the link if you want to know more.
Here it is again, now pointing directly at the drop table.
Sparc
The person is in free-fall for longer, and hence has a greater speed at the bottom. If the speed is high enough, the body pulls free of the neck.
I forgot who said the words but it went something along the lines of: “Make my fall a big one” (maybe from a western?) This way you’ll die much sooner. Also, I read somewhere that when hung you’re very likely to defecate, I can provide the cite if you’d like.
D12, from that link:
I didn’t see the same mentioned for hanging but I may have missed it.
In the old West, a hanging was sometimes referred to as “seeing someone dance,” intimating that the victim was not only not killed outright, but was not even bound up at the arms and legs.
The most famous accidental decapitation was that of Black Jack Ketchum, whose head went sailing into startled audience (I always wondered if the person who caught it would be the next one hanged!).
Here are a few relevant, brief quotes from Joseph Persico’s book, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial;
“After Streicher disappeared through the trapdoor, an eerie moan persisted. Woods descended the steps and vanished behind the curtain. Soon the moaning stopped.”
“McGlaughlin inserted the first flashbulb and began shooting… As he worked, he noticed bloody bruises about the mouths and noses of several of the bodies.”
“Cecil Catling…asked Woods about reports that an unconscionable amount of time had elapsed before some of the men were pronounced dead–17 minutes for Ribbentrop, 18 minutes for Jodl, a startling 28 minutes for Keitel. He further had it on good authority, Catling said, that some of the men’s faces were smashed…”
“The Army never used Master Sergeant Woods as a hangman again.”
According to Persico, Woods had performed 347 executions prior to these.
That’s contested though yojimboguy. Not refuted all together, but contested.
I don’t doubt that, I simply posted it because some others had requested that I provide more detail than I did in my original post to this thread.
Indeed, when I found Persico’s book and re-read the material, I would say that my first post, based on memory alone, overstated the level of “botchery”. Ooh, I like that, is that a real word?
Eve, I honestly cannot remember the last time I laughed so hard!
F. U. Shakespeare
(still a bachelor, defying all those garters I’ve caught!)
A properly performed hanging breaks a person’s neck. A drop with a rope around your neck won’t necessarily do it, you need those ‘coils’ on a hangman’s noose.
Clifford W. Ashley, in The Ashley Book of Knots, has this to say, in his section on “Occupational Knots”
As the rope snaps taut the knot pushes sideways against the head snapping the neck.