(EITHER WAY EFFECTIVE) Not every hanging went as planned, but it got the job done. Most of those hung back in the day, especailly in the old West. They were not as much scared to die but the manner of death. Word travelled thought out the West of botched hangings. Most feared the worse of all botch’s decapitation. Not a really enjoyable site I’m guessing while drinking your morning coffee, in the town’s square. But then again the Old West was a whole other beast. Most Ranchers at the time left cattle russlers hanging in the tree’s as a warning and a land marker (now thats home security). There is no way to understand just how many people were hung back then , but how many that were not even guilty. Let’s take just a few steps into the long crazy history of hanging in the United States, but first let’s understand hanging when used in execution form. 
(WHEN THE TRAP DOOR OPENS) When it goes wrong it goes real wrong, but why how did it happen. Well here’s the formula if you will the Hangman’s Handbook sorta speaking. (The Short Drop) is a method of hanging performed by placing the prisoner on a stool, a ladder, the back of a cart, horse, or other vehicle, with the noose around the neck. The support is then moved away, leaving the person dangling from the rope.
Suspended by the neck, the weight of the body is used to tighten the noose around the trachea and neck causing strangulation and subsequently death. This takes around 10 and 20 minutes, with unconsciousness occurring within 6–15 seconds.
Before 1850, the short drop was the standard method for hanging, and is still common in suicides and extrajudicial hangings which do not benefit from the specialized equipment and drop-length calculation tables used by the newer methods. That’s fucking insane, but it get’s even worse. (The POLE Method). 
The condemned is made to stand before a specialized vertical pole or pillar, approximately 9 feet in height.
A rope is attached around the prisoner’s feet and routed through a pulley at the base of the pole.
The prisoner is hoisted to the top of the pole by means of a sling running across the chest and under the armpits.
A narrow diameter noose is looped around the prisoner’s neck, then secured to a hook mounted at the top of the pole.
The chest sling is released, and the prisoner is rapidly jerked downward by the assistant executioners with a foot rope.
The executioner stands on a stepped platform approximately 3 and 1/2 feet high beside the prisoner, and guides the head downward with his hand simultaneous to the efforts of his assistants. In some countries the executioner would then manually dislocate the prisoner’s neck.
This method was later also adopted by the successor states, most notably by Czechoslovakia; where the “pole” method was used as the single type of execution from 1918 until the abolition of the capital punishment in 1990. Nazi war criminal Karl Hermann Frank, executed in 1946 in Prague, was among approximately 1,000 condemned people executed in this manner in Czechoslovakia. Ok that is even more insane, but other countries they just go about things there own way. (The Standard Drop) involves a drop of between 4 and 6 feet and came into use from 1866, when the scientific details were published by an Irish doctor, Samuel Haughton. Its use rapidly spread to English-speaking countries and those where judicial systems had an English origin.
It was considered a humane improvement on the short drop because it was to be enough to break the prisoner’s neck, causing immediate unconsciousness and rapid brain death.
This method was used to execute condemned Nazis under United States jurisdiction after the Nuremberg Trials including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. In the execution of Ribbentrop, historian Giles MacDonogh records that: “The hangman botched the execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for twenty minutes before he expired.” A Life magazine report on the execution merely says: “The trap fell open and with a sound midway between a rumble and a crash, Ribbentrop disappeared. The rope quivered for a time, then stood tautly straight. (The LONG Drop) This process, also known as the measured drop, was introduced to Britain in 1872 by William Marwood as a scientific advance on the standard drop. Instead of everyone falling the same standard distance, the person’s height and weight were used to determine how much slack would be provided in the rope so that the distance dropped would be enough to ensure that the neck was broken, but not so much that the person was decapitated. The careful placement of the eye or knot of the noose (so that the head was jerked back as the rope tightened) contributed to breaking the neck. Prior to 1892, the drop was between four and ten feet, depending on the weight of the body, and was calculated to deliver a force of 1,260 lbf, which fractured the neck at either the 2nd and 3rd or 4th and 5th cervical vertebrae. This force resulted in some decapitations, such as the infamous case of Black Jack Ketchum in New Mexico Territory in 1901,(which is the picture above) owing to a significant weight gain while in custody not having been factored into the drop calculations. Between 1892 and 1913, the length of the drop was shortened to avoid decapitation. After 1913, other factors were also taken into account, and the force delivered was reduced to about 1,000 lbf. The decapitation of Eva Dugan during a botched hanging in 1930 led the state of Arizona to switch to the gas chamber as its primary execution method, on the grounds that it was believed more humane. One of the more recent accidental decapitation also occurred during the 1962 hanging of Arthur Lucas, one of the last two people to be put to death in Canada. Chilling to say the least. 
(SUCH A NICE DAY,LET’S DO 4) A total of 40 suspected Unionists were hanged in Gainesville, Texas in October 1862. On 7 July 1865, 4 people involved in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln—Mary Surratt(R), Lewis Powell(RM), David Herold(LM), and George Atzerodt(TL) (Group photo is at bottom of page)—were hanged at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. Who were all convicted by a military tribunal . The main idoit behind this bullshit murder was, 
John Wilkes Booth (May 10, 1838 – April 26, 1865) was an American stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. A member of the prominent 19th-century Booth theatrical family from Maryland. Booth was also a Confederate sympathizer who, denouncing President Lincoln, lamented the recent abolition of slavery in the United States.
Originally, Booth and his small group of conspirators had plotted to kidnap Lincoln, but they later agreed to murder him as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Although its Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, had surrendered to the Union Army four days earlier, Booth believed that the Civil War was not over yet because the Confederate army of General Joseph E. Johnston was still fighting.
Booth shot President Lincoln once in the back of the head. Lincoln’s death the next morning completed Booth’s piece of the plot. Seward, severely wounded, recovered, whereas Vice President Johnson was never attacked. Booth fled on horseback to southern Maryland and, 12 days later, at a farm in rural northern Virginia, was tracked down sheltered in a barn. Booth’s companion there surrendered, but Booth maintained a standoff. After the authorities set the barn on fire, Union soldier Boston Corbett fatally shot him in the neck. Paralyzed, he died a few hours later. Of the 8 conspirators later convicted, four were soon hanged,(that’s our merry group above and below). You see that the history of hanging people is still swinging in the breeze. It surely has it’s twist and turns, ok enough puns. We will have more crazy tales of hanging and other forms of executions, and the history of the death penalty state by state. So STAY TUNED IN CHECK OUT THE PAST SHOWS ON THE3RDFLOOR PODCAST AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE iTunes LISTENERS HIT THAT PURPLE ICON AND LEAVE QUICK HELLO PLEASE PLEASE HELP GET US GET RANKED EVERYONE ELSE YOU LIKE US TO LEAVE A COMMENT WE ARE EVERYWEHERE YOU GET YOUR PODCAST @ANCHOR @SPOTIFY SO TILL NEXT TIME WE’LL BE “HANGIN OUT IN SPACE AND TIME” 