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Execution of those convicted

of serious crimes is a form

of punishment that has been utilized

in almost every nation on earth

since the dawn of civilization.

It goes back as long as there's been life on this planet.

If you did something to me, I'll do something to you.

In a world without modern societal structures

such as criminal courts and prisons, the Biblical notion

of "an eye for an eye" was seen as suitable punishment

for a perpetrator, and compensation for the victim.

As more complex societies developed, so did the methods

of execution, some designed to be swift and efficient,

but many others deliberately crafted

to prolong the experience as much as possible,

for the dual purpose of inflicting the maximum amount

of suffering whilst providing

the most gruesome entertainment to onlookers.

Today, much of the world

has now outlawed capital punishment.

What was once seen as "God's will"

and "righteous justice" now seems cruel

and inhumane to the eyes of many.

Modern societies like to think

of themselves as more enlightened than those

of the distant past, but as we shall see,

it is humanity's recent past that demonstrates most terribly

how the State's power to end the lives

of those seen as criminals can be abused.

The very earliest set

of written laws that still survives to this day,

known as the Code of Hammurabi,

not only specified which crimes were capital offenses,

but also the specific manner

in which the convicted criminal was to be put to death.

Richard Felix is a Paranormal Historian,

television presenter and author.

The earliest record that I know of

is in Babylon, where they actually created 25 different

offenses that you could be executed for.

For burglary, the convict would be hung

from a gibbet constructed

at the site where the crime took place.

For rape, bigamy or seduction

of a daughter in law, drowning was the specified punishment,

and in cases of incest or looting,

the convict was to be burnt alive.

In 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 suffer his fate.

Even lesser crimes could result in horrific punishments,

often involving the brutal severing of a body part.

Ancient methods of execution were some

of the most torturous ever devised.

One unusual form of execution favored

in ancient Greece was known as Scaphism.

They 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.

The horrific results

were described by Greek philosopher Plutarch:

Ancient Egypt was home to a sophisticated justice system

of courts and judges.

However, it operated under the principle

of "guilty until proved innocent",

and the sentences could be as barbaric

as any in the ancient world.

Mutilation and flogging were common punishments

for minor offenses, and for capital crimes,

execution could be carried out by beheading,

being buried alive, drowned, impaled,

or even being fed to crocodiles.

In South East Asian territories, "slow slicing",

otherwise known as "death by a thousand cuts",

was a punishment for the most serious offenses.

You were literally stripped naked,

tied to a post, and then pieces

of your flesh were cut away.

They even had a set of knives

with labels on that they would just pick at random,

so if that one said tongue, then out came your tongue.

If that one said breast, then off came the breast.

And they continued for hours and hours,

cutting small pieces of flesh,

and then the last one, the coup de grace

of course, was the dagger that said heart,

and that was plunged into the heart to kill.

Families 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."

In other parts of Asia,

crushing or dismembering by elephant

was a preferred method of execution.

The ability to control a large animal such as an elephant

was a significant demonstration

of power and authority.

They would train an elephant

of course, to, not to necessarily stand straight

on the heart, but crush other parts

of the body first.

which is again, a long, slow death.

The impressive spectacle

of such an act was considered a powerful deterrent,

so much so that the practice continued

until comparatively modern times,

and was described in the Kingdom

of Siam by Scottish sea captain Alexander Hamilton.

One of the more conventional,

and certainly the most well-known,

methods of capital punishment used

in the ancient world was crucifixion.

Whilst most commonly associated

with the death of Jesus Christ,

the use of crucifixion as both a criminal punishment

and as a method for disposing

of vanquished enemies can be dated back

to many centuries before the time of Jesus.

Alexander 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.

By the time of the Roman Empire,

crucifixion was commonly used as a punishment

for capital crimes.

Thousands and thousands of people

were crucified by the Romans.

Whilst the depiction

of Jesus nailed upon the cross is to much

of the world an indelible image

and one which epitomizes the act of crucifixion,

in fact the Romans carried out many types of crucifixion.

Sometimes they crucified you upside down.

Which of course was actually more humane,

because you would die quicker of unconsciousness.

Roman philosopher Seneca the Young

once observed:

The original Latin word that today we translate

as crucifixion actually applied to many different forms

of painful execution, including being impaled on a stake,

or affixed to a tree, an upright pole

and of course, an upright pole

with a cross beam as popularly depicted today.

As the Roman soldiers guarding the execution site

could not leave until death had occurred,

they were sometime tempted to help things along.

The guards stayed with you for the whole time,

because you would last for days.

But sometimes, the guards would actually finish you quicker,

as they reckon they did with Jesus

of course, with the spear.

In other cases, however, the person was

often deliberately kept alive as long

as possible to prolong their suffering

and humiliation.

In the case of a slave being convicted

of killing their master,

all of the victim's slaves would be crucified,

a practice which sometimes involved dozens

or even hundreds of innocent people being executed.

When Roman senator Lucius Secundus was murdered by a slave,

some in the Senate tried to prevent the mass crucifixion

of 400 of his slaves,

but in the end tradition prevailed

and every single one was executed.

Such cruelty was not without controversy even at the time,

celebrated Roman philosopher Cicero described it

as a "most cruel and disgusting punishment".

He famously wrote:

Over the centuries, as empires fell

and nations warred, methods of torture

and execution became ever more cruel and imaginative.

In Europe during the Middle Ages,

the death penalty was commonly used a punishment

even for minor offenses.

Execution by breaking the body over a wheel

was a technique first explored by the Romans.

However, use of the "breaking wheel"

as it was to become known, was popularized as a form

of public execution throughout much

of Europe during the Middle Ages.

I think the most inhumane form

of execution is breaking on the wheel.

You were taken to the execution on a cart,

but on the way the executioner had a brazier

of coals and a pair of pincers,

and they would rip flesh from your body

before you even got to the execution.

They would then pour either boiling oil

or sulfur, sometimes boiling lead, into the wound.

They would then strap you to a wheel and break you,

and that's smashing your bones,

starting with the ankle, the shin, the knee, the thigh.

Then the same with the next leg.

Then one arm, the wrist, the shoulder, then the next arm.

This could take as long

as the executioner wanted to take it.

And then the coup de grace would be a blow to the chest.

This was either done

with a metal bar or sometimes a sledgehammer.

Once this torture was complete,

the convict would then be tied to the wheel

which was then raised up on a pole

or mast, ready for a slow

and agonizing death not unlike a crucifixion.

Eventually the body was burned

and your ashes scattered to the wind.

The fear of witchcraft

that spread throughout Europe

and early American settlers proved another source

of victims for those that delighted in the most cruel

of punishments.

Between 1400 and 1775, approximately 100,000 people

were tried and prosecuted for witchcraft in Europe

and the American colonies.

Around half of these were executed.

You had to prove they were a witch,

which was a bit difficult.

So they were stripped naked to search for the devil's mark,

a birthmark, a wart.

If none of those things happened then it was up

to God to decide, trial by ordeal.

They tied your left toe to your right thumb,

your left thumb to your right toe, rope round you

and threw you in the pond.

If you sank to the bottom you were innocent.

If you rose to the surface, as most people did,

you were a witch.

Under a law of Queen Elizabeth,

witchcraft was a criminal offense, a hanging offense.

The most common form

of execution for those convicted

of witchcraft was to be burned at the stake,

where the condemned was tied to a large wooden stake

and a fire lit under them, resulting in a protracted

and agonizing death.

Sometimes the executioner would tie a rope around

the neck and pull on the rope

and strangle them as the flames were getting higher,

but often they were burned alive.

In some cases, as small act

of mercy, a container of gunpowder was attached

to the victim, which would explode once heated

by the fire, killing them instantly.

There is just one European leader who is remembered

to this day more for his preferred manner

of execution than for any other achievement.

Vlad Dracula, better known as Vlad The Impaler,

ruled Romania during the 15th century, and stories

of his immense cruelty circulated far

and wide, both during his life

and after his death in 1476.

With the invention of the printing press,

books detailing his exploits,

together with lurid drawings, were best sellers of the time.

He was, of course, best known

for sentencing his enemies to impalement.

That's a spiked wooden pole that was greased

and then placed in any aperture

that they could find, usually the anus.

They would hoist them onto it

and then leave them there

as they slipped down the pole until it came out

of all different parts

of the body, sometimes even the mouth.

This was a vile, disgusting form of execution.

It was said that even after his eventual defeat

and imprisonment, Vlad took to capturing rats

in his prison cell

and impaling them on scraps of wood.

To be hanged, drawn and quartered

was possibly the bloodiest method

of execution carried out in Britain

and Ireland during the Middle Ages.

The whole thing was symbolic.

It was a form of torture,

even though torture was illegal in England,

but it was to make you suffer

and it was to send you to hell.

Possibly the most gruesome punishment

ever devised, it was reserved for those found guilty

of high treason.

The sentence for a traitor was

that you be taken from this jail

and dragged backwards to a place of execution.

Backwards because what you'd thought up,

treason, was unnatural.

There you will be hanged between heaven

and earth, not fit to inhabit either.

We are talking of slow strangulation,

so after two or three minutes you would still be alive.

You'd be taken down, laid on the drawing,

quartering and beheading block,

which is a butcher's block for human beings,

your privy parts cut off and burned before your eyes.

Your bowels and entrails to be ripped out

of your belly because of the inward treacherous thoughts

that you'd had.

Treason.

A good executioner could get you disemboweled,

all 37 feet, small intestine,

while you're still alive and conscious.

Your head to be severed from your body

because your head had thought up the treacherous thoughts,

and your body divided into four equal quarters,

and those quarters to be at the disposal

of whatever monarch was on the throne at the time.

All of this would take place in public,

before a baying crowd, and in the case

of multiple executions, convicts would be forced

to watch the disembowelment

of their fellow inmates before it was done to them.

Finally, the convict was beheaded

and put on display as a gruesome warning to others.

In some cases, the head would be pickled in a jar

in an attempt to ensure the face remained recognizable.

Although this most extreme form

of punishment was not used routinely,

and was reserved only for cases

of high treason, there are many examples

of its use that are still remembered to this day,

such as the execution

of Scottish knight Sir William Wallace.

When William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered,

his quarters were taken to different parts

of the country

and the reason was that if the body wasn't whole,

then on the day of judgment you'd go to hell.

Members of the English nobility convicted

of wrongdoing faced a punishment more in keeping

with their status in society.

Beheading was reserved was kings

and queens and aristocrats.

However, no matter the status

of the convict, the executioner himself

may not always have been up to the task.

You've got an executioner that's probably taken

from the condemned cell

and asked to become an executioner.

He'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.

Now, he would nervous, and of course

there's one very good way

of calming your nerves down before and execution,

and that's alcohol.

So the chances of taking a head off

in one blow was very remote.

It took three blows to take

off the head of Mary Queen of Scotts,

and five blows to take off the head of the Duke of Monmouth.

After the fourth blow the body was still moving

and Monmouth was still alive.

In order to avoid such suffering,

it was customary for the condemned person

to pay their executioner a tip,

the more generous the payment, it was hoped,

the swifter the death would be.

Laurence Shirley, the 4th Earl Ferrers,

who'd murdered his bailiff, when he gave his purse

of gold or silver, he handed it

to the assistant executioner instead of the executioner,

and there was a punch up on the scaffold.

Across the Channel in France,

beheading was seen as much more

of a skilled profession.

In France they did it with a sword,

and you had to kneel down

with your neck up and the executioner would swing

and take the head off like that.

One of the most celebrated French executioners

was Charles Henri Sanson.

Sanson was the Royal Executioner during the reign

of King Louis the XVI, and was the fourth

in a six-generation family dynasty of executioners.

The Sanson family, there were seven members

of the Sanson family all became executioners.

It was passed down from, sometimes from father to son,

from uncle to nephew.

During his lifetime,

Sanson personally executed almost 3000 people.

On one occasion, he was called upon

to execute a young nobleman for the crime of blasphemy.

He was a young man,

and you obviously had to kneel.

And Sanson said, "Sir, will you kneel?"

and he said, "I am an aristocrat, I will not kneel."

And he remained standing.

Sanson took one blow and went straight through the neck.

The body continued to stand

with the head still on the neck.

Sanson looked at him and said "Shake yourself, it's done."

And then the head rolled off

and the body crumpled onto the floor.

In the 18th century,

the idea that the condemned man should be forced to suffer

as much as possible began to be replaced

by a drive for sheer efficiency.

When the French Revolution came,

a very famous executioner called Henri Sanson,

who beheaded people with a sword,

realized that if he was going

to have to execute all these clerics, religious people,

aristocrats, he'd need a lot of swords.

Luckily a gentleman of the national assembly,

Dr. Ignatius Guillotine, came up with a,

what he believed to be a humane form

of execution, the guillotine.

The guillotine was praised

for its efficiency, an efficiency that allowed

for an astonishing 17,000 executions

to take place in the course of just one Revolutionary year.

When they originally designed it,

it had a crescent shaped blade,

and that wasn't efficient enough

because that actually crushed the neck

before it took the head off,

and, would you believe, Louis the XVI, he was a bit

of an engineer, and he had a look at the guillotine

when it was first being made

and realized that it would be far better

to have a blade at an angle of 45 degrees,

which would slice through the neck quickly.

He was one of the first people executed on the guillotine.

There is some evidence to suggest

that death by guillotine may not be as quick

and painless as may appear.

There was a lot of discussion

and debate about whether the brain continued

to function after the head had been taken off.

In 1905, a Dr. Beaurieux got permission

to stand by the guillotine

when a chap called Languille was beheaded.

The doctor waited a few seconds,

then shouted "Languille!"

Though it remains most famous as a device connected

to the French Revolution

and the 1700's, the guillotine remained

as the official method of execution in France

well into modern times and was still in use in the 1970s.

In England in the year 1810,

Sir Samuel Romilly stated in the British Parliament

that there was:

Over the course of the next century this was to change,

with vast numbers of minor crimes being removed from the list

of capital offenses.

Public executions ceased in 1868,

not because the public appetite for them had diminished,

but because many influential figures at the time

saw that they had become little more than an entertainment,

often accompanied by the selling of alcohol.

Charles Dickens wrote in a letter

to The Times newspaper:

It would be like a day at the fair.

There'd be pie sellers, people selling a program

of your trial and life to read about you

as you were dangling at the end of a rope.

There'd be pickpockets there, riots, people would be drunk.

It came from higher up,

this was too popular, we must stop it.

With the end of public executions,

the need for especially cruel

and gruesome punishments was also at an end.

Death by beheading and quartering

was officially abolished in 1870,

all executions for the rest

of the 19th century were to be carried out by hanging.

In each town there would be a county gallows,

which would be a football goal,

and then there would be one ladder, sometimes two ladders.

You would go up one ladder,

the rope would be fixed round your neck,

the executioner would be up the other ladder, fixing it.

He'd come down, and then he would turn you off,

as it was called, turning you off the ladder,

and you died of slow strangulation.

Before 1850, the short drop

was the standard method of hanging.

Thanks to the work of Irish doctor Samuel Haughton,

the short drop was superseded in the second half

of the century by what came to be known

as the standard drop.

It was a platform with a lever and a trapdoor.

When the trapdoor opened

and you dropped through, it would sever between the second

and third vertebrae,

bringing about hopefully an instantaneous death.

However, the standard drop was no guarantee

of a quick death.

Famous examples of the failure

of this technique include the execution

of convicted US civil war criminal Henry Wirz.

Wirz was hanged in November of 1865,

watched by a crowd of spectators,

but the drop failed to break his neck.

Spectators were forced to watch as Wirz

was slowly strangled over the course of 20 minutes.

The standard drop was later superseded

by the long drop, developed by William Marwood,

himself a practicing executioner.

The exact height of the drop varied depending on the height

of the convict, from as little as four feet

to as much as eight feet.

William Marwood, clever as he was,

at the beginning he only measured the victim,

he didn't weigh them.

So a man of five foot seven

and 12 stone got the same drop

of a man of five foot seven and 20 stone.

The danger with using the long drop technique

was that if there was a miscalculation,

the results could be horrific.

American outlaw Tom Ketchum,

known by the nickname Black Jack, was executed

for train robbery using the long drop technique in 1901.

Ketchum's weight was measured

when he was taken into custody,

but was not remeasured prior to his execution,

despite significant weight gain during his time in jail.

The extra weight was therefore not taken

into account when the drop was calculated

for his execution.

As Ketchum dropped with the noose around his neck,

the force was so violent that his head

was torn from his spine, an image that was captured

by a photographer.

This and other such incidents

caused many United States authorities

to look at alternative methods of execution.

The electric chair, which was to become synonymous

with executions in the United States,

was first conceptualized by a New York dentist

in 1881 to be a more humane form

of death than hanging.

The initial design took the form

of a custom-built wooden chair

with electrodes that attached to the victim's head and leg.

After a variety of tests on animals,

authorities and experts remained unsure

as to the precise current

of electricity that was required

to bring about instant death.

The first official execution by electric chair,

was, perhaps unsurprisingly, a gruesome affair.

William Francis Kemmler was convicted

of killing his common-law wife Tillie Zeigler in 1889,

and his execution was to be carried out

by electric chair on the 6th of August, 1890.

Kemmler's last words as he was placed

in the chair were:

The generator attached to the chair was charged

with 1000 volts, which was thought to be enough

to induce immediate unconsciousness and cardiac arrest.

This current was applied to Kemmler for 17 seconds,

after which he was pronounced dead.

However, witnesses pointed out that he was still breathing.

Kemmler was quickly examined by two physicians

who confirmed he was still alive,

and the call was made for the current

to be switched back on.

This time, 2000 volts were applied.

Blood vessels under Kemmler's skin ruptured and bled,

and some witnesses claimed his body caught fire.

A reporter for the New York Times later wrote:

When it was finally over, the execution

had lasted for eight minutes

and was widely considered to have been far more cruel

and unpleasant than the use of hanging.

The electric chair, not humane at all.

In my opinion an extremely inhumane form

of execution that I still believe is being done

in America in some states to this day.

Whilst often cruel and merciless,

institutions throughout history

that have wielded the power to legally take the life

of a human being have done so either in times

of war or in response to capital crimes

such as rape and murder.

But when a government decides to take control

of the justice system

and use it for political ends,

simply holding the wrong opinion

or even just being in the wrong place

at the wrong time can result in imprisonment,

torture and execution.

"The Iron Curtain", a term first used

by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946, referred to the area

of Russia and Eastern Europe

that came under Communist Soviet control

after the Second World War.

The Soviets came to power in Russia in 1917 in the midst

of a workers' revolt and a violent coup

against the Russian monarchy.

In the century prior to the revolution,

approximately 6000 death sentences were handed down

due to a person's political beliefs or activities,

and so during the Second All Russian Congress

of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies,

the new Soviet government decreed the abolition

of the death penalty.

However, it was quickly reinstated just a few months later,

and by the end of the following year the Soviet Regime

had already executed more than 15,000 people

and they were just getting started.

During the 1920s, the Russian secret police

were actually issued

with quotas to determine how many people were to be arrested

and executed, regardless of any actual criminal activity.

We are talking of hundreds of thousands of people.

Stalin, I mean, had the Polish aristocracy

and officer class completely obliterated.

During Stalin's "Great Purge"

of the 1930s, 720,000 people were executed,

often after highly publicized show trials

at which they were forced to confess

to various political crimes.

In fact, the confessions came only after weeks

of torture, including beatings and simulated drowning.

By comparison, the method of execution employed,

a gunshot to the head, was at least less cruel

than under many earlier regimes.

However, the Soviets had other ways

of ensuring the death of their enemies.

By the time of Stalin's death in 1953,

approximately five million people per year

were being sentenced to the gulag,

a series of forced labor camps,

where a slow death from cold,

over-work, torture or starvation was often the outcome.

Many more millions were starved as a result

of deliberately engineered food shortages

and famines, bypassing the justice system altogether.

By the time of the eventual collapse

of the Soviet Union in 1989, it is now known that tens

of millions had been put to death by the regime,

a figure that is only matched by equally horrific rule

of Chairman Mao Ze Dong in China.

After a period of civil war,

the formation of the People's Republic

of China was announced by Mao Ze Dong on the 1st

of October, 1949.

Having received considerable support in the year prior

from the Soviet Union,

Mao adopted a Soviet style approach to leadership.

As in the Soviet Union, show trials took place

at which convicts were publicly denounced

before being taken away for execution by way

of a bullet to the back of the head.

However, such was the political fervor at these trials,

tensions sometimes ran so high that the condemned person

was beaten to death by an angry mob

before the formal execution could be carried out.

Mao Ze Dong was himself a fervent believer in the use

of capital punishment against political opponents.

Indeed, unlike in virtually every other society in history,

it was political crimes,

and only political crimes, that Mao considered worthy

of the death penalty.

The rule of law itself was effectively suspending

during the Cultural Revolution, wherein people

were encouraged to attack and destroy any remnants

of the old, Pre-Revolutionary China.

Hundreds of thousands

of people have been exterminated.

Whilst the thousands

of deaths may not have been recorded as official executions,

the use of such violence was explicitly encouraged,

most famously by the publication

of Mao's "Little Red Book",

a collection of quotes from Mao Ze Dong.

People were killed en mass at political rallies,

and as in the Soviet Union, forced labor camps

and engineered food shortages

caused many more millions of deaths.

This period in China's history has proved

to be the deadliest of anywhere in the world,

with an estimated 65 million people

having lost their lives through the action of the regime.

But perhaps the most horrific abuse

of the power of the state over life

and death was seen in Cambodia,

where the Communist revolution

led by Pol Pot resulted in one quarter

of the entire population being put to death.

Pol Pot, who was introduced to Communist theory

while studying in France, took control

of Cambodia in 1976

and immediately began brutalizing the population

with his Khmer Rouge army.

Pol Pot, in Cambodia, he created this idea

of doing away with industrialization completely.

The country's cities were forcibly evacuated,

with the stated intent

of creating a new, agrarian society in the countryside.

But the result was two million deaths.

The Khmer Rouge regime executed anyone whom it suspected

of having connections with the former Cambodian government,

as well as professionals, intellectuals,

Buddhists and other minorities.

Just wearing a pair of glasses

could cause you to be executed,

because they thought you might have been

a more intelligent person.

It was also considered necessary

to execute not only the suspected dissident,

but often their entire family as well.

Pol Pot himself said,

Whilst the Khmer Rouge initially sought

to imitate their Soviet predecessors

by carrying out executions via a gunshot

to the back of the head, the relative poverty

of Cambodia as a nation

meant that they simply could not afford the cost

of the bullets required to do so.

Those intended to be put to death

were therefore simply struck on the back of the head

and thrown into shallow ditches in remote areas

known as the Killing Fields.

Even small children and babies were not spared,

and were smashed against trees

before being thrown into the mass graves.

Many prisoners were also subjected to hideous torture

and medical experiments, which were so horrific

that the prisoners tried in every way to commit suicide.

The screams were said to be so loud that they had

to be covered by loudspeakers playing propaganda music

of the Khmer Rouge.

Today, the site of the most notorious prison

has been turned into a museum, where it is recorded

that more than 20,000 people had been tortured

and imprisoned there.

This was just one of almost 200 similar prisons

that existed throughout the country.

More like ethnic cleansing, I think, than execution.

We are talking of hundreds of thousands of people.

By the end of the 20th Century,

it's widely believed that the Communist regimes

in power in the Soviet Union

and elsewhere, had together been responsible for the deaths

of over 100 million people.

As the 20th century progressed,

more and more voices in the Western world began

to question the legitimacy of capital punishment.

Over the course of numerous individual acts of Parliament,

laws in the United Kingdom gradually changed.

Whilst the public overwhelmingly supported the use

of the death penalty in cases of murder,

a number of miscarriages of justice during the 1950s

strengthened the case for abolition.

The Homicide Act of 1957

attempted to create two different classifications of murder,

those which were capital crimes,

and those which were not.

Capital punishment for murder

was finally abolished completely by an Act

of Parliament in 1965.

When we abolished hanging in 1965,

some people were against hanging

and some people were for hanging,

but the interesting thing is that from 1965

until 2001 the amount of murders

that took place in this country doubled.

Capital punishment did remain

for a small number of very specific crimes:

Surprisingly, until 1973 the official punishment

for the crime of treason was death by beheading,

although this was never actually carried out.

All remaining capital offenses, including treason,

were finally removed from law in the late 1990's

by the Tony Blair government, bringing the UK into alignment

with much of Europe.

As of the present day, capital punishment is banned

in all members of the European Union.

Whilst Russia retains capital crimes in law,

no executions have taken place there since the 1990s.

In all of Europe, only Belarus actively

retains the death penalty,

where it is carried out by shooting.

Even in the United States of America,

the death penalty today is seldom used,

with the number of executions per year having reduced

from 85 in the year 2000 to just 24 in the year 2023.

The vast majority of these were carried out

by lethal injection.

The idea of using an injection

of lethal chemicals to cause an immediate death

was first proposed in the late 1800s

by New York doctor Julius Mount Bleyer,

writing in the Medico-Legal Journal.

However, lethal injection as a method

of execution was not adopted in law until 1977.

Despite the straightforward sounding name,

death by lethal injection is a relatively complex process.

One of the problems is, of course,

is 'cause a doctor can't do it,

because they'll be breaking the Hippocratic Oath,

so it's left to some form of prison official to do it,

and an awful lot of those

that are executed in America these days

of course are taking drugs intravenously,

and they can't find a vein.

And even, sometimes, the condemned man

is actually helping the prison official to find a vein.

The process begins with the condemned person

having two intravenous cannulas inserted, one in each arm.

A saline drip is then started in both arms

to ensure that the lines are not blocked,

and a heart monitor is attached to the inmate.

The lethal chemicals are then added to the IV

in a specific order to first induce unconsciousness followed

by death through paralysis of the respiratory muscles

or by cardiac arrest.

The chemical combination used begins with Sodium Piothentol,

which normally causes unconsciousness within 30 seconds.

This is followed by Pancuronium Bromide,

a muscle relaxant which causes paralysis

of the diaphragm, sufficient to cause death by asphyxiation.

Finally, Potassium Chloride to stop the heart,

resulting in death by cardiac arrest.

This normally occurs within minutes,

though there have been recorded cases

where the entire process took more than an hour.

I don't understand why they have such a problem,

because when your animal is put to sleep

they give it an injection and it goes to sleep,

and then they give an injection that kills it.

But for some reason they never seem, well,

sometimes don't seem to get the mixture right.

Some opponents to the technique point out

that once the muscle relaxant has been administered,

there is no way to tell if the initial dose

of Sodium Piothentol has actually

fully induced unconsciousness.

Since the muscle relaxant causes paralysis,

it may be that the inmate suffers great pain

during the administering of Potassium Chloride,

but is simply unable to express their discomfort.

In other parts of the world, capital punishment

is still very much on the agenda.

In the Islamic world, the Quran specifies the death penalty

for a large number of crimes.

An Amnesty International report

from 2020 calculated that almost 90%

of all the world's executions took place in either Iran,

Iraq, Egypt or Saudi Arabia.

Death by decapitation is the form

of execution most associated with Islamic law,

although surprisingly it is not explicitly called for

in the Quran, although some scholars site a reference

to "smiting the necks" of enemies.

Currently, Saudi Arabia is the only country

in the world which uses decapitation

within its Islamic legal system.

The majority of executions carried out

by the Wahhabi government are public beheadings,

which usually draw large crowds

but are not allowed to be photographed or filmed.

Outside of the Islamic world, the largest number

of executions carried out today

by a single nation take place

in the People's Republic of China.

Unlike the chaos of the Mao era,

modern China has a rigorous justice system.

Whilst some political crimes remain capital offenses,

added to the list are more typical crimes

including arson, rape of a minor and drug trafficking.

Capital punishment in China can be imposed

on crimes against national symbols

and treasures, such as theft of cultural relics

and even the killing of giant pandas.

Elsewhere in South East Asia,

capital punishment remains in use,

particularly for drugs-related offenses,

in Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Japan retains the death penalty for aggravated murder

and utilizes the long drop method of hanging.

Despite its abolition many decades ago,

popular opinion in Europe remains generally in favor

of capital punishment, although only by a small margin.

I think the last poll they had, I believe 59%

of the population of this country believe that some form

of death penalty should be reintroduced.

Those in favor

of its reintroduction normally refer to the fact that fear

of execution acts as the strongest possible deterrent.

Perhaps the most emotional argument in favor

of the death penalty, particularly in cases

of murder, is that the perpetrator simply deserves

such a punishment, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"

as the famous Biblical quote has it.

As we have seen, the justice systems

of many ancient societies were founded

on exactly this basis,

and in all of human history,

the move towards abolishing the death penalty in much

of world represents a tiny fragment of time.

It was only a few short decades ago,

within the lifetime of many people still alive today,

that millions of people were being executed

by regimes that some in the West praised

and still defend today.

I personally believe that some form

of death sentence should be administered for the murder

of children, murder of policemen and premeditated murder.

You bought the gun, you loaded it

with six bullets and you pulled the trigger five times.

You meant to do it.

Could it be that capital punishment

will make a return to Western Europe?

In light of the growing discontent

with the apparent acquiescence

to lawlessness currently being felt

in many European capitals, it may be a question

not of if, but of when.