THE HORROR OF BEHEADING EXECUTION "A CAPITAL PUNISHMENT BY WHICH THE HEAD IS SEVERED FROM THE BODY

 

Beheading, a mode of executing capital punishment by which the head is severed from the body. The ancient Greeks and Romans regarded it as a most honourable form of death. 

Before execution the criminal was tied to a stake and whipped with rods. In early times an ax was used, but later a sword, which was considered a more honourable instrument of death, was used for Roman citizens. Ritual decapitation known as seppuku was practiced in Japan from the 15th through the 19th century. 

One symbolic consequence of the French Revolution was the extension of the privilege of beheading to criminals of ordinary birth, by means of the guillotine.

According to tradition, beheading by sword was introduced to England by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. Death by the sword, in which the victim stood or knelt upright (because a block would have impeded the downward stroke of the weapon), was usually reserved for offenders of high rank, as it was considered to be the equivalent of being killed in battle. Simon, Lord Lovat, was the last person to be so executed in England, in 1747.

Beheading, usually by ax, was the customary method of executing traitors in England. The victim was drawn (dragged by a horse to the place of execution), hanged (not to the death), disemboweled, beheaded, and then quartered, sometimes by tying each of the four limbs to a different horse and spurring them in different directions. In 1820 the Cato Street Conspirators, led by Arthur Thistlewood, became the last persons to be beheaded by ax in England. Having plotted to murder members of the government, they were found guilty of high treason and hanged, and their corpses were then decapitated.

Although beheading was one means of executing political prisoners in Nazi Germany, the practice is now rare in European countries, most having abolished capital punishment. However, it is still practiced occasionally in some Asian and Middle Eastern countries.

Beginning with the murder of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist kidnapped in Pakistan in 2002, Islamic militant groups such as al-Qaeda embraced beheading as a propaganda tool, distributing gruesome videos of such executions to media outlets and on the Internet.

 ISIL, a Sunni insurgent group in Iraq and Syria, staged mass beheadings of Syrian and Iraqi captives beginning in 2014 and also used the threat of beheading to extract ransom payments from some Western governments. Several British and American hostages were beheaded by ISIL.

Guillotine, instrument for inflicting capital punishment by decapitation, introduced into France in 1792. The device consists of two upright posts surmounted by a crossbeam and grooved so as to guide an oblique-edged knife, the back of which is heavily weighted to make it fall forcefully upon (and slice through) the neck of a prone victim.

An execution by guillotine during the Reign of Terror, depicted in Une Exécution capitale, place de la Révolution, oil on paper mounted on canvas by Pierre-Antoine Demachy, c. 1793; in the Carnavalet Museum, Paris.(more)

Previous to the French Revolution, similar devices were in use in Scotland, England, and various other European countries, often for the execution of criminals of noble birth. In 1789 a French physician and member of the National Assembly named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was instrumental in passing a law that required all sentences of death to be carried out by “means of a machine.” This was done so that the privilege of execution by decapitation would no longer be confined to the nobles and the process of execution would be as painless as possible. After the machine had been used in several satisfactory experiments on dead bodies in the hospital of Bicêtre, it was erected on the Place de Grève for the execution of a highwayman on April 25, 1792. At first the machine was called a louisette, or louison, after its inventor, French surgeon and physiologist Antoine Louis, but later it became known as la guillotine. 

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