A length of rope, but how long?
``Death by hanging seems
to be the cheapest, most efficient and humane method of carrying out the
death sentence,'' declares Quintin Gomez of San Fernando, Pampanga in a
letter to the editor, which the Bulletin published last week. ``The two
upright beams, crossbar, platform, trapdoor or prop, and a length of rope
appear simpler than the other methods.'' Mr. Gomez believes that hanging
is preferable to the electric chair and the gas chamber (which are expensive)
and the guillotine (which is gruesome).
Mr. Gomez oversimplifies.
It is not simply ``a length of rope'' that is involved in hanging. The
hangman has to determine how far down the condemned man has to drop before
he is jerked to a stop by the noose around his neck.
If the drop is too short,
the condemned man dies slowly of strangulation -- and this would not meet
Mr. Gomez's criterion of humaneness If the drop is too long, his head will
be pulled right off -- and this would be as unesthetic as the guillotine.
If condemned men were all
of equal weight, a standard length of rope will do.
But since condemned men
come in all shapes and sizes, the hangman has to determine the length of
the rope so as to ensure that the condemned man dies instantaneously by
dislocation of the neck when he hits the end of the rope. It is obvious
that the heavier the man, the shorter the length of the drop.
The problem of how much
rope to give a condemned man was studied extensively by James Berry, who
was appointed public executioner of Great Britain in 1884. His studies
are reported in his autobiography My Experiences as an Executioner, which
was first published in 1892.
Mr. Berry started off with
a rule-of-thumb, ``Taking a man of 14 stones as a basis and giving him
a drop of 8 ft., which is what I thought necessary, I calculated that every
half-stone lighter weight would require a two-inches longer drop.'' A stone
is equivalent 14 pounds.
Mr. Berry embodied this
weight-drop relationship in a table which he used in his work. He realized
that his table represented only a hypothesis that had to be tested against
reality -- and so, like a true scientist, he observed the results of his
work and recorded his observations.
Also, he modified his procedure
when circumstances seemed to warrant it. He reported that for ``persons
of very fleshy build, who often have weak bones and muscles about the neck,
I have reduced the drop by a quarter or half of the distance indicated
by the table.... ''
Mr. Berry's formula worked
quite well until Nov. 30, 1885, when he had to hang a murderer named Robert
Goodale, who weighed 15 stones. Following his own formula, Mr. Berry calculated
that the drop for Mr. Goodale should be 7 ft. 8 in. -- and then, noting
that the muscles of Mr. Goodale's neck ``did not appear well-developed
and strong,'' he reduced the length of the drop to 5 ft. 9 in.
This length still proved
to be too long. The jerk severed the head entirely from the body. ``Death
was instantaneous,'' Mr. Berry wrote, ``so the poor fellow had not suffered
in any way, but it was terrible to think that such a revolting thing should
have occurred.''
Mr. Berry reviewed his records
and generated a new hypothesis. He started looking at the condemned man
as a falling body that would have a certain striking force when it came
to the end of the rope.
Mr. Berry estimated that
if a falling human body was jerked to a stop with a striking force of 2,400
pounds, the condemned man dies instantaneously by dislocation of the neck,
but the neck is not severed from the body.
He consulted physics textbooks
and discovered that the striking force (in hundredweight, i.e., 100 pounds)
would be equal to the weight (in stones) multiplied by the square root
of the drop (in feet).
Therefore, to compute the
drop necessary to have a striking force of 24 hundredweight, all one has
to do is to take the square of 24 (or 576) and divide it by the square
of the condemned man's weight.
Under this formula, Mr.
Goodale should have been given a drop of less than 3 ft. This new formula
worked far better than the old one.
***
Mr. Berry is described as
``a handsome man, the beauty of his features being marred only by a long
deep scar extending down his right cheek and another great scar across
the forehead.''
``He was a technological
innovator, being the first British hangman to use the brass eyelet,'' writes
Ronald Meek, who, by this time, should have retired from the University
of Leicester, where he was a professor of economics.
Mr. Berry also ``was an
economist,'' Professor Meek continues, ``in his autobiography there is
a chapter headed `Hanging: From a Business Point of View' in which he makes
an earnest plea for the substitution of time rates for piece rates.''
Professor Meek uses the
story of Mr. Berry to introduce his readers to the concept of the ``functional
interdependence of variables.'' Professor Meek's book is titled Figuring
Our Society: An introduction to the use of quantitative methods in the
social sciences (London: Fontana/Collins, 1972).