Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (44 page)

STARVATION

Starvation was a very slow method of execution, carried out by immuring the condemned person in a dungeon or prison cell, no further drastic action being needed.

In England this was given the name of
prison forte et dure
, strong and severe imprisonment, and, like its successor,
peine forte et dure
, being pressed to death, it was also used to persuade prisoners to plead in court.

The law was horrifyingly clear about it, as decreed by an act of 1275 in the reign of Edward I:

‘It is provided also, That notorious Felons, which openly be of evil name, and will not put themselves in Enquests of Felonies that Men shall charge them with, before the Justices at the King’s suit, shall have strong and hard Imprisonment (
prison forte et dure
) as they which refuse to stand to the common law of the land; But this is not to be understood of such prisoners as be taken of light suspicion.

And if they will not put themselves upon their acquittal, let them be put to their penance until they pray to do it; and let their penance be this, that they be barefooted, ungirt and bareheaded, in the worst place in the prison, upon the bare ground continually, night and day; that they eat only bread made of barley or bran, and that they drink not the day they eat, nor eat the day they drink, nor drink anything but water, and that they be put in irons. And the punishment is to continue till those who refuse the law seek what they before condemned, or die.’

Starvation was an obvious way of dispatching criminals worldwide. In Germany it was customary to confine a criminal under a cask for three days or longer, while in thirteenth-century Spain the Count of Gheradesca, together with his two sons and grandsons, were confined in the Tower of Gualandi and there left to starve to death for deserting the Pisans in the war against Genoa in 1284. Further away, in Afghanistan, criminals were placed in a cage mounted on top of a high post and there left to starve.

STONED TO DEATH

‘Egan and Salmon, highway robbers and murderers, were taken to Smithfield amidst a surprising concourse of people, who no sooner saw the offenders exposed on the pillory, than they pelted them with stones, brickbats, potatoes, dead dogs and cats, oyster shells and other things.’

A simple method of execution, ammunition being freely available, especially in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Sudan, Iran and Pakistan, stoning to death was, and to a lesser extent still is, the penalty for such crimes as blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, incest and breaking religious commandments. Lewis’s
Origins of the Hebrews
describes a scene from Biblical times:

‘When the offender came within four cubits of the place of execution he was stripped naked, only leaving a place before, and his hands being bound, he was led up to the fatal place, which was an eminence twice a man’s height. The first executioners of the sentence were the witnesses, who generally pulled off their clothes for the purpose; one of them threw him down with great violence upon his loins; if he rolled upon his breast, he was rolled upon his loins again, and if he died by the fall, there was an end. But if not the other witnesses took a great stone, and dashed it upon his breast as he lay upon his back, and then, if he was not dispatched, all the people that stood by threw stones at him until he died.’

The Christian martyrs were similarly treated. The story of St Joseph’s fate reported:

‘After removing the holy man to some little distance and binding his hands behind him, they dig a pit for him and bury him therein up to the middle. Now did they overwhelm the saint with such a snowstorm of stones that his head alone remained visible, all the rest of him being buried beneath the heap of stones. And when one of the ruffians saw the head still moving, he orders one of the men to take a stone as big as he could wield and throw it down upon him. So when this was done and his head crushed by the weight of the stone, the saint gave up his precious soul to Christ.’

In the seventeenth-century persecution of the Piedmontese Protestants, many suffered such deaths. Henry Moore, writing in 1809, told how ‘for refusing conversion to the Catholic Faith, Judith Mandon was fastened to a stake and sticks and stones thrown at her from a distance. By this inhuman proceeding her limbs were beat and mangled in a most terrible manner, and at last one of the bludgeons dashed her brains out.’

During other religious struggles in Europe, the Huguenots buried alive a Catholic priest of the parish of Beaulieu, leaving only his head above the ground. His tormentors then buried other clergy in a similar fashion, and improvised a hideous sport of retreating a short distance and rolling boulders at the exposed heads, in a macabre game of ninepins, until death overwhelmed their targets.

Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
records that during the reign of Henry VIII, Thomas Sommers, an honest merchant, with three others, was thrown into prison for reading some of Luther’s books. Ordered to throw the books in a fire at Cheapside, Summers had deliberately thrown his over the fire, for which ‘he was sent to the Tower, where he was stoned to death’.

In the days of the pillory in England, such missiles brought gory death to many a victim. Helpless to resist or avoid the brickbats, those deserving the crowd’s approbation were a sitting, or rather a standing, target. Many died in this fashion. In August 1731, Mother Needham, an infamous procuress, was stoned to death in the pillory on Park Lane in London, and in March 1736, as described in the
Newgate Calendar
:

‘Egan and Salmon, highway robbers and murderers, were taken to Smithfield amidst a surprising concourse of people, who no sooner saw the offenders exposed on the pillory, than they pelted them with stones, brickbats, potatoes, dead dogs and cats, oyster shells and other things. The constables now interposed but, being soon overpowered, the offenders were left to the mercy of the enraged mob. The blows they received occasioned their heads to swell to an enormous size; and by people hanging on to the skirts of their clothing they were near strangled. They had been on the pillory about a half-hour when a stone struck Egan on the head, and he immediately expired.’

In recent centuries a somewhat different though equally fatal method has been adopted by Middle Eastern countries. The victims, male or female, are buried in sand up to their necks, having first had their arms and legs bound together. Doubtless in order to hide the terrified expressions on the faces of the victims from their tormentors, sheets are spread over their heads, and the crowd proceeds to pelt them with stones until the spreading bloodstains on the sheets and the absence of dying screams convince them that the sentence has been duly carried out. Intense pain is suffered by such victims, death eventually being caused by exhaustion and multiple injuries to the head.

The size of the stones or rocks is governed by Article 119 of the Islamic Code of Iran, which states: ‘In the punishment of stoning to death, the stones should not be too large so that a person dies by being hit by one or two of them; they should not be too small either that they could not be defined as stones.’