Daily Globe

Improved Methods of Execution.

It is not surprising that from time to time attention is recalled to the barbarous nature of the mode of executing the death penalty in this country. Hanging by the neck till the criminal is dead is obviously a relic of barbarism; it is the most primitive, the most various, the least prompt and uniform and certain of the modes of execution which have been or could be devised. If the object of an execution now-a-days be to insure the rapid and certain death of the criminal without any probability of intervening accident, delay or torture, hanging by a cord and trusting to the rough adjustment of weight and fall which the "eye and experience" of an ignorant hangman can afford, is the most fallible of methods, and must of necessity from time to time lead to painful scenes of torture. The garotillo is, perhaps, of all existing foreign methods of legal execution the most rapid and certain; but without proposing any one substitute for our own responsibility—whether the carbonic acid chamber, the massive electric discharge, or any other method—it is certain that any scientific man or commission could very speedily devise a prompt and bloodless certain mode of execution which would be free from the clumsiness and uncertainty of hanging. The retention of this ancient relic of past barbarism is not creditable to our jurisprudence.—British Medical Journal.