Last week, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law a bill that allows the state to execute death row inmates via firing squad. Previously, the state allowed such inmates to choose between lethal injection or death by the electric chair; under the new law, death by electrocution becomes the primary, default method of capital punishment, yet inmates are able to choose either death by firing squad or lethal injection (“if it is available at the time of election”) instead if they so wish.
The parenthetical “if it is available” is the key here, as the move is primarily due to the increasing unavailability of the pharmaceutical drug concoction used in lethal injections. Nor is South Carolina alone in legalizing the practice: Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah all permit firing squad as a method of capital punishment, though they each retain lethal injection as the primary method.
This word-limited space is not the place to get into the ethics or efficacy of the death penalty, merely where we dig into the historical antecedents of the topic du jour. And, boy, have we humans come up with some ways to punish people capitally over the years.
Aristotle, for example, claims that the first written laws in ancient Athens came from a man named Draco, circa 621 B.C. He, too, claims that the laws were written not in ink but in blood, as the punishment for nearly every criminal offense was death. “Draconian,” indeed. Popular methods of execution across ancient Greek history included death via hemlock (such as with Socrates), being thrown off steep cliffs, or through death “on the board” (to put it tamely, being stretched to death).
The Romans, of course, were fond of crucifixion, which they picked up from the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars. But the practice most likely began with the Assyrians and Babylonians; it was only thanks to Alexander the Great and his conquest of Persia that crucifixion spread to the Mediterranean. Crucifixion was typically reserved for non-Romans and enemies of the state (usually escaped slaves and Christians), but it was far from the only method of capital punishment they practiced. For example, certain “criminals” (typically slaves and prisoners of war) were forced to face execution in the arena as bestiarii, men who fight wild animals, except they faced their slaughter naked and unarmed.
Medieval Europe, among its cavalcade of grisly torture devices and killing methods, allowed “trial by combat” or “trial by ordeal” to adjudicate guilt in certain matters. (While it was typically reserved for civil disputes, in early European history, the distinction between civil and criminal was virtually nonexistent.) When evidence was scant or no witnesses were present, disputants could choose to do battle to the death, with the winner held to be free and innocent since he had prevailed with God on his side. Trial by battle was a feature of medieval Anglo-Norman law, but the practice lived on far longer than it should have, with the last recorded trial by combat in Great Britain occurring in 1597.
The East has had more than its fair share of capital punishments, many of which make the guillotine, gibbet, and headman look tame. Dating back to the Middle Ages, India was fond of execution by elephant, which I’m sure was excruciatingly painful but sounds morbidly interesting. Trampling sure sounds better than lingchi, the Chinese method of “death by a thousand cuts” that consisted of slowly slicing a victim over and over again before eventual death. And I’m not even going to explain the ancient Persian execution method of scaphism (Google at your own risk).
The samurai of Sengoku Japan practiced seppuku, or ritual suicide, which was undertaken either voluntarily or as capital punishment. It was an extremely slow and painful means of death, wherein a samurai would plunge his short sword into his stomach and draw it across the belly, opening the organs, before being decapitated by another samurai acting as his second. Even then, I’d take seppuku over scaphism any day (seriously, do not Google this).
