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Hanging is killing a person by suspending them from the neck with a noose or ligature. Hanging has been a common method of capital punishment since the Middle Ages, and is the primary execution method in numerous countries and regions. The first known account of execution by hanging is in Homer's Odyssey. Hanging is also a method of suicide.
Capital punishment in the United Kingdom predates the formation of the UK, having been used within the British Isles from ancient times until the second half of the 20th century. The last executions in the United Kingdom were by hanging, and took place in 1964; capital punishment for murder was suspended in 1965 and finally abolished in 1969. Although unused, the death penalty remained a legally defined punishment for certain offences such as treason until it was completely abolished in 1998; the last execution for treason took place in 1946. In 2004 the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights became binding on the United Kingdom; it prohibits the restoration of the death penalty as long as the UK is a party to the convention.
Capital punishment in Singapore is a legal penalty. Executions in Singapore are carried out by long drop hanging, and usually take place at dawn. Thirty-three offences—including murder, drug trafficking, terrorism, use of firearms and kidnapping—warrant the death penalty under Singapore law.
Roxalana "Roxana" Druse, was the last woman hanged in the state of New York, and the first woman hanged in 40 years in Central New York. Her botched execution didn't kill her instantly, further motivating New York officials to replace the gallows with the electric chair in New York in 1890.
Mariticide literally means the killing of one's own husband. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own boyfriend. In current common law terminology, it is used as a gender-neutral term for killing one's own spouse or significant other of either sex. The killing of a wife or girlfriend is called uxoricide.
Capital punishment in Australia was a form of punishment in Australia that has been abolished in all jurisdictions. Queensland abolished the death penalty in 1922. Tasmania did the same in 1968. The Commonwealth abolished the death penalty in 1973, with application also in the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory. Victoria did so in 1975, South Australia in 1976, and Western Australia in 1984. New South Wales abolished the death penalty for murder in 1955, and for all crimes in 1985. In 2010, the Commonwealth Parliament passed legislation prohibiting the re-establishment of capital punishment by any state or territory. Australian law prohibits the extradition or deportation of a prisoner to another jurisdiction if they could be sentenced to death for any crime.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
It is possible to convict someone of murder without the purported victim's body in evidence. However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder. Developments in forensic science in recent decades have made it more likely that a murder conviction can be obtained even if a body has not been found.
Mary Ann Britland was an English serial killer. She was the first woman to be executed by hanging at Strangeways Prison in Manchester by James Berry.
Ann Bilansky was an American housewife convicted in 1859 of poisoning her husband with arsenic. She is the only woman in Minnesota to receive the death penalty and the first white person in the state to be executed by hanging.
Catherine Wilson was a British murderer who was hanged for one murder, but was generally thought at the time to have committed six others. She worked as a nurse and poisoned her victims after encouraging them to leave their money to her in their wills. She was described privately by the sentencing judge as "the greatest criminal that ever lived".
To be hanged, drawn and quartered became a statutory penalty for men convicted of high treason in the Kingdom of England from 1352 under King Edward III (1327–1377), although similar rituals are recorded during the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272). The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged, emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. His remains would then often be displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge, to serve as a warning of the fate of traitors. For reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burned at the stake.
Mahmood Hussein Mattan was a Somali former merchant seaman who was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Lily Volpert on 6 March 1952. The murder took place in the Docklands area of Cardiff, Wales, and Mattan was mainly convicted on the evidence of a single prosecution witness. Mattan was executed in 1952.
Susan Newell was the last woman to be hanged as capital punishment in Scotland. She was arrested after acting suspiciously and the discovery of the body of a 13-year-old newspaper boy, John Johnston. Although there were no witness accounts of him being killed, circumstantial evidence was presented at her trial. She was found guilty of his murder, a plea of insanity was rejected, and she was sentenced to death.
Ann Hibbins was a woman executed for witchcraft in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, on June 19, 1656. Her death by hanging was the third for witchcraft in Boston and predated the Salem witch trials of 1692. Hibbins was later fictionalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous novel The Scarlet Letter. A wealthy widow, Hibbins was the sister-in-law by marriage to Massachusetts governor Richard Bellingham. Her sentence was handed down by Governor John Endicott.
Louisa Collins 11 August 1847 – 8 January 1889) was an Australian convicted murderer. She lived in the Sydney suburb of Botany and married twice, with both husbands dying of arsenic poisoning under suspicious circumstances. Collins was tried for murder on four separate occasions, with the first three juries failing to reach a verdict. At the fourth trial the jury delivered a guilty verdict for the murder of her second husband and she was sentenced to death. Louisa Collins was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol on the morning of 8 January 1889. She was the first woman hanged in Sydney and the last woman to be executed in New South Wales.
The Richmond child murder was the case of Amy Gregory who was convicted in 1895 of strangling to death her daughter, Frances Maud Gregory, whose dead body was found on the ice in the Old Deer Park, Richmond, England. She was granted a reprieve from execution by the Home Secretary.
Charity Lamb was an American murderer who was the first woman convicted of murder in Oregon Territory. She had traveled west from North Carolina via the Oregon Trail, before settling near Oregon City with her husband and six children. On May 13, 1854, Lamb mortally wounded her husband by striking him twice in the back of the head with an axe. Rumors, and information presented by the prosecution at trial, implicated involvement with a paramour, by Charity and possibly her teenage daughter, herself acquitted of the murder two months prior. The defense argued that her husband had a long history of domestic violence, and the murder was committed in self-defense, or out of a level of fear that rose to insanity, marking her trial as an early example of the abuse defense.
Robert Colvin Smith was the last person to be publicly executed in Scotland.
References
- ↑ "1862: Mary Timney, the last woman publicly hanged in Scotland". Executed Today.
- ↑ "Mary Timney: the last woman publicly hanged in Scotland". BBC News.
- ↑ "Mary Timney". True Crime Library. 20 October 2015.
- ↑ "Mary Timney - for the murder of her neighbour". Capital Punishment UK.