The UK suspended the death sentence for murder
in 1965, nearly a decade after the last two hangings.
The hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, hung up his rope
very quietly soon after completing his last job in 1957,
no more were to follow as people viewed with distaste
their own fears, made public of 'justice gone wrong'
where the wrong man and woman died of a crime
they should be punished for more by committing them
to criminal mental institutions, grim as they were.
Nobody else applied for the post of hangman,
and no new way of judicial murder was devised.
The suspension remained until the law was struck
down, annulled, in 1998. How unlike America
the UK was, where different states competed
in reinventing different ways for completing
the death sentence, different lethal injections,
different gases for gas-based death, new designs
of electric chairs, and even reviving the firing squad,
the list of state means of death keeps getting longer.
And all this whilst fewer and fewer states used the means
of killing prisoners, and for a few years it was banned outright,
death row lengthens, maintained by stays and legal appeals.
Into this debacle Judge David Duncan was chosen to report
to the governor of Arizona on the competence and methods
of the those who led the law in state executions.
It is a long and grizzly read, but take in what you can of it here.
