Public Executions Quotes
There was, and still is in some parts of the world, this belief taht one of the main reasons for capital punioshment with visible and public executions was to deter others from comitting crimes by seeing the example of what happens to the transgressors. For these people, exemplified by this quotation of Dr. Johnson's, public executions are crime prevention. This notion tirned out to have been a fallacy. In England they found that during every public hanging, skilled pickpockets would steal from the onlookers who were tranfixed on the macabre secene--this despite the fact that pickpocketing was a hanging offence.
Public Hangings in America were not abolished for another six decades. See Quotation 644484 in Related Quotes.
Charles Dickens himself, a true nineteenth-century liberal, lent his weight to the campaign to abolish public executions. After seeing the execution of Maria and Frederick Mannings for murdering Maria’s lover, Patrick O’Connor, in Horsemonger Lane, outside the Surrey County Gaol on 13 November 1849, he wrote this to the Times. Public hangings were abolished in 1868. The last one took place outside Newgate Prison on 26 May of that same year. The man hanged was an Irish terrorist called Michael Barratt who had blown up the Clerkenwell House of Detention killing six people. A drunken crowd stayed up all night to witness the execution. They cheered wildly when the scaffold was brought out at dawn. More people – mainly young women and children – began to arrive. By the time a bell was sounded at eight o’clock in the morning to announce the arrival of the condemned man, the crowd stretched back as far as Smithfield.
John Holloway and Benjamin Haggerty went to the scaffold on 22 February 1807 still protesting their innocence over the murder of John Cole Steele on Hounslow Heath five years earlier. They were joined by Elizabeth Godfrey who had been convicted of the wilful murder of Richard Prince the previous Christmas, by stabbing him in the eye with a pocketknife. They were hanged together. According to the Newgate Calendar, a monthly journal of the executions at Newgate Prison in London. It was first published in the middle of the 18th century and later became a monthly magazine of the most salacious crimes in England. This quotation illustrates the great popularity that public execution had become in England. The drew more spectators than athletic events, theaters, or concerts. On this occasion in 1807 there were thosands of deaths and casualties from the unrully and unsupervised mob of spectators.
Queen Boudicca of the Iceni tribe had revolted in Roman Britain. The Romans where particularly harsh in putting down revolts but under Emperor Nero and Caligula after him, they sunk to the deepest of barbarities,
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was not thye inventor or the execution machine that bears his name. The actual inventor of the prototype was Antoine Louis. However, Guillotin--a physician by training was very concerned that a very high percentage of beheadings were botched by the executioner and the victim suffered greatly. He became the public and political advocate for the reform of the mode of execution in France to reduce suffering. The device ended up with his name as the noun to describe it. In this quotation, he made his first majhor speech to his fellows of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1791. Prior to the Frech Revolution beheading was the method of execution reserved for the Nobility & Aristocracy. They couod pay the executioner a "fee" to be sure that his sword or ax was sharp and that he/she would not suffer much. Nonetheless, many executions were botched. After the Revolution giving ALL citizens the same royal execution if they were convicted felons. So its adoption was a revolutionay act and philosophically based.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
The analogy to Jesus being restrained at his crucifixion did seem to comfort the King who in his mind had been chosen by God to Rule and wouod certainly ascend to Heaven.
Most people think that the Spanish Inquisition was the locus of witch burning, but it was not. Germany was.
Kozinski was a supporter of captial punishment, but beileved it important that society was very slear about what it was doing. Executing a man is a very brutal process, and shen society determines that it is necessary, it shoud face the fact and the reality of the decision it is making. Hence he favored public executions
The Irish Priest was the Confessor to French King Louis XVI at his execution in the French Revolution
