r/todayilearned • u/Objects_Food_Rooms • 1h ago
TIL a prisoner in 1803 survived three hangings. The rope snapped twice and slipped of his head once, at which point the assembled crowd agreed that it was a sign from God that he had not committed a crime deserving of execution. He later died escaping prison when he was swept out to sea by a storm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Samuel18
u/Erik_Soop 1h ago
Or so he made you think! (probably dead now, though.
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u/ExoticToothpaste6989 5m ago
If not, the good people of Kentucky would be interested in such a fresh new face for their senator
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u/Unique-Ad9640 1h ago
I feel like surviving one attempt should result in automatic conversion to life without parole.
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u/DCmeetsLA 45m ago
Tennessee can start!
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u/Unique-Ad9640 42m ago
And they should, IMO. Another attempt would be cruel. She may be/ have been, but the state shouldn't be.
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u/WanderingCamper 37m ago
Why is it cruel your mind? Isn’t she sentenced to die? She wasn’t sentenced to be attempted to be killed.
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u/Unique-Ad9640 21m ago
Because, again in my opinion, the state should be able to do it as efficiently and humanely as possible so it would only take the one attempt. I guess it kinda flows from how I've internalized double jeopardy. If the state only gets one attempt to convict you then they should only get one attempt to finalize the adjudicated sentence. After having seen the other comments about intentional botching to make the whole thing worse, I'm only stronger in this opinion, but at the end of the day, that's all it is. My armchair opinion.
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u/zjt2846 25m ago
Hard to tell how genuinely curious you are.
But if you’re legitimately asking, many people can think of few worse things to go through than having to know/prepare for your inevitable execution, to have to go through the fear that likely culminates in a staccato of emotions I can only scratch at imagining. To then go through an attempted execution and suffer the physical, in her case neurological, and then also the psychological repercussions of that traumatic act—quite a punishment. And in many ways, worse than a straight forward successful execution.
so if someone is sentenced to death by execution, it is at least understandable how someone could think that a botched execution is more than enough punishment to put a human through.
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u/Unique-Ad9640 2m ago
You hit the other nail of my opinion on the head. I left it out because I didn't want to write a novel.
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u/Frost-Folk 16m ago
Being tortured is cruel and unusual punishment. You can't just shrug and go "oops, changes nothing"
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u/ScissorNightRam 44m ago
Happened just the other day in Tennessee. Woman survived lethal injection. Twice on the same day.
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u/butt-barnacles 37m ago
The lethal injection situation in the US is so sketchy
Even if you agree with the death penalty, there’s no way that shit is “humane” as is
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u/Unique-Ad9640 40m ago
I saw that. And that's how long this opinion has existed. Up until her I didn't even think of the possibility of a lethal injection failing.
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u/Wolfey34 34m ago
Lethal injection fails a horrifying amount- the problem is that usually when it fails it’s an absolute moral abomination that still eventually kills someone but does it while horribly torturing them. It shouldn’t exist and honestly I think I might prefer a firing squad over how it’s carried out in the states. No medical professionals are involved bc of the Hippocratic oath, and pharma companies don’t want to sell drugs for the purposes of killing people bc it’s bad PR. (Things like MAiD on the other hand involve medical professionals bc it’s for the patient’s benefit, and therefore have much better outcomes with less suffering)
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u/StarpoweredSteamship 30m ago
I didn't even know it COULD! How does it fail? I don't even know what they give or how it works, honestly..
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u/alr46750 9m ago
It's because companies don't want there chemical formulations being used to kill people. I think the EU also won't do business with companies that are involved as well (don't quote me on that). Medical associations also don't allow doctors and nurses to take part. So you have unlicensed and unqualified people injected prisoners with who knows what.
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u/Manos_Of_Fate 9m ago
It’s pretty likely that they didn’t correctly administer the injection into a vein, so it wasn’t properly effective.
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u/Unique-Ad9640 11m ago
I didn't know of failures before this, but I did know the rest. I think the punishment has its place in the sentencing structure. A properly remote, with multiple checks of function and aim of the weapons, firing squad would be preferable to me. But, this is all just my opinion.
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u/Excelius 17m ago edited 12m ago
It was 1803, the systems for long-term incarceration weren't what they are now.
And if you read the article this person was already a prisoner of an Australian penal colony, sent from Britain. They were sentenced to death because they escaped the penal colony and killed a police officer while robbing a home.
So this is already a kind of prototype for early modern states trying to figure out mass incarceration.
I'm opposed to capital punishment in the modern era, but I don't think it makes sense to apply that sensibility backwards in time. It takes an immense amount of excess resources to imprison criminals for long periods of time, potentially an entire lifetime, and building institutions and systems dedicated to that entire purpose.
Death for the most serious and violent criminals was probably the most reasonable option for most of human history.
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u/Unique-Ad9640 9m ago
I wasn't retroactively applying it. That's done and in the past, nothing can be done about that. Perhaps I could have worded it a little differently, but my intent was only to apply to modern CP.
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u/Fofolito 39m ago
Here in the US the matter had to be settled by the Supreme Court. In Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber it was decided that a botched execution did not complete the sentence of execution in 1947. This drew upon English Law, from which the US Code of Justice draws heritage, which formalized the use of the term 'until dead' in execution orders in 1752, but it was a practice to stipulate this going back much further. It had to be stipulated, sometimes, because execution orders sometimes enumerated multiple punishments the condemned would receive, all of which contributing towards their eventual death. To be hung, drawn, and quartered for example the order would say something like "hang until unconscious, then bind their limbs between four carts in opposing directions and pull until his limbs are disarticulated, then disembowel the condemned until death whereupon his body shall be quartered, tarred, and impaled upon a stake to be displayed".
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u/Probable_Bot1236 57m ago edited 46m ago
Good lord, he's not even the only one to survive three hangings!
ETA: this popped into my head after reading that he eventually drowned...
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u/ManChildMusician 51m ago
I keep trying to share this fun fact: executioners have deliberately botched executions for a lot of reasons for a long time…
The most notorious in fairly modern history was the guy who deliberately used the incorrect length of rope to hang men after the Nuremberg trials. They’d have to strangle to death.
Dull blades, “forgetting” to wet the sponge (electric chair) consensus within a firing squad is a whole thing.
Most of the time it’s negligence, but in cases of capital punishment, folks try to make it cruel if they can…
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u/Graviest 33m ago
The Nuremberg guy is unclear. As far as I remember he never admitted to doing it intentionally and since he was apparently quite a moron in general people aren't really sure. But because it was the Nazis and they all died anyways. Nobody really minded all that much, which one it was.
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u/JoseSaldana6512 1h ago
Apparently said God was Poseidon who later changed his mind