How does hanging kill you

At this point, the rope becomes rigid, and the force of the noose should break the victim's neck, causing immediate paralysis and unconsciousness. The procedure causes a classic "hangman's fracture" — a break between the head and the neck, effectively snapping the upper cervical spine. In most cases, the victim dies of asphyxiation. Though nobody really knows how long it takes a person to die from hanging, experts say it is probably anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes.

In judicial hangings, as opposed to suicides, there is significant damage to the spinal cord. If the victims fall more than the prescribed distance, they may even pick up enough speed that the noose itself decapitates them, as happened Monday to the former Iraqi dictator's half brother Barzan Ibrahim. They were to be hung by the neck until dead , and which postmortems are expected to confirm.

Its potential as a deterrent in particular, a popular claim that imagines the state as an imposing executioner, is yet to be demonstrated, especially for crimes against women. That said, the act of hanging itself is gruesome in its right, using a method that dates to ancient Greece and technology to the midth century, although there have been many adjustments. India itself uses a method called the long-drop.

Since then, people have been executed, nearly half of them by the Government of Uttar Pradesh. Until the midth century or so, the short-drop hanging was the most common method. The goal of the long drop is to get the body moving quickly enough after the trap door opens to produce between 1, and 1, foot-pounds of torque on the neck when the noose jerks tight. This distance can be anywhere from 5 to 9 feet 1. With the knot of the noose placed at the left side of the subject's neck, under the jaw, the jolt to the neck at the end of the drop is enough to break or dislocate a neck bone called the axis , which in turn should sever the person's spinal cord.

In some cases, the hangman jerks up on the rope at the precise moment when the drop is ending in order to facilitate the breakage. The idea of a 'humane hanging" was developed by an Irish mathematician and doctor named Samuel Haughton. He calculated how far the prisoner would have to fall and then be brought up by a jerk on the rope so they would be killed quickly and relatively painlessly. Haughton published his findings in In , 55 countries still had the death penalty, according to Amnesty International.

In the United States, judicial hanging is legal in both Washington state and Delaware, and three prisoners have been hanged since the death penalty was reinstituted in , the last in We'll explain how an "ideal hanging" or a long drop works, and what happens with a "short drop. During an "ideal long drop," the prisoner's neck breaks and spine severs, blood pressure drops down to nothing in about a second, and the subject loses consciousness. Brain death then takes several minutes to occur, and complete death can take more than 15 or 20 minutes, but the person at the end of the rope most likely can't feel or experience any of it.

In a less-than-ideal long drop, if the distance is miscalculated or some other factor misses the mark, the subject will die of decapitation if the drop is too long or of strangulation if the drop is too short or the noose knot isn't in the correct position. Strangulation can take several minutes and is a far more excruciating experience. J Forensic Sci ; 30 : — Department of Health. National suicide prevention strategy for England. London: Department of Health, How are nations trying to prevent suicide?

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