List of methods of capital punishment

Quartering

This is a list of methods of capital punishment.

Method	Description
Animals	Tearing apart by horses (e.g., in medieval Europe and Imperial China, with four horses; or "quartering", with four horses, as in The Song of Roland and Child Owlet) Trampling by horses (example: Al-Musta'sim, the last Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad) Devouring by: Damnatio ad bestias (i.e. as in the cliché, "being thrown to the lions") Animals such as dogs or wolves, as in Ancient Rome and the Biblical lion's den Rodents, such as rats Alligators, crocodiles, or sharks Insects, such as ants Stings from scorpions and bites by snakes, spiders, etc. Crushing by elephant^[1] Snake pit
Boiling to death	This penalty was carried out using a large cauldron filled with water, oil, tar, tallow, or even molten lead.
Breaking back	A Mongolian method of execution that avoided the spilling of blood on the ground^[2]
Breaking wheel	Also known as the Catherine wheel
Buried alive
Burning	Supposed to have been popular for executing for religious heretics and witches, though this has been contested as largely a myth.
Cooking	Brazen Bull
Crucifixion	Roping or nailing to a wooden cross or similar apparatus (such as a tree) and allowing to perish.
Crushing	By a weight, abruptly or as a slow ordeal.
Decapitation	Also known as beheading.
Disembowelment
Dismemberment	Being drawn and quartered sometimes resulted in dismemberment.
Drawing and quartering
Drowning
Electrocution	The electric chair
Explosives
Falling
Flaying	Cutting off the skin
Garrote
Gassing	Asphyxiation by gas in a sealed chamber
Guillotine
Hanging
Immurement	Being left to die of starvation or dehydration.
Impalement
Lethal injection
Pendulum^[3]	A type of machine with an axe head for a weight that slices closer to the victim's torso over time
Poisoning
Sawing
Scaphism
Shooting	By firing squad By a single shot (such as the neck shot, often performed on a kneeling prisoner, as in China) By cannon (used by the British during the 1857 Indian Rebellion)
Slow slicing
Stabbing
Starvation / Dehydration	Immurement
Stoning
Strangulation

References

^ This Won't Hurt a Bit: A Painlessly Short (and Incomplete) Evolution of Execution.
^ Chingis Khan
^ R.D. Melville (1905), "The Use and Forms of Judicial Torture in England and Scotland," The Scottish Historical Review, vol. 2, p. 228; Geoffrey Abbott (2006) Execution: the guillotine, the Pendulum, the Thousand Cuts, the Spanish Donkey, and 66 Other Ways of Putting Someone to Death, MacMillan, ISBN 0312352220, p. 213. Both refer to the use of the pendulum (pendola)by inquisitorial tribunals. Melville, however, refers only to its use as a torture method, while Abbott suggests that the device was purposely allowed to kill the victim if he refused to confess.

External links

Internationalist Review - article on the evolution of execution methods in the United States
This Won’t Hurt a Bit: A Painlessly Short (and Incomplete) Evolution of Execution

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