The "evolution" of the death penalty in America: from hanging from a tree branch to remote-controlled shooting

The Americans began to execute "states" by hanging. As we've seen in Westerns, when sheriffs organized executions, they used the trapdoor gallows system, an excellent system, if one may say so, because if the length of the rope was calculated correctly, the hanged man died not slowly from suffocation, but quickly, from a break in the so-called "collar bone," or second cervical vertebra, or C2.

They were quite "civilized" even with summary executions, those improvised by passing a rope over a tree branch and dropping the hanged person from a horse. Even the so-called "lynching" was usually a hanging, but more similar to the system still in use today in certain nations, such as Iran, where the hanged person, with their feet on the ground, is lifted by force of arms with their neck tightened in a noose. Here, death is decidedly slow. The first electrocution was performed in 1890. In Italian, we use the term "electric chair ," and not everyone knows that the prototype was developed by Thomas Alva Edison. Electricity worked, but it wasn't available everywhere, and not always with the necessary power.

This led, in 1924, to the inauguration (on a Chinese man) of the gas chamber system. Hydrogen cyanide, obtained by dropping a sodium cyanide tablet into a jar of sulfuric acid, did not always develop and rise adequately, and several malfunctions occurred, resulting in slow executions. Thus, the shooting was revived, a practice that had never completely fallen into disuse, but had long been reserved for the military, in the sense that hanging was for common criminals, while execution by firing squad was for those who committed crimes while wearing uniform, meaning that death by firing squad was more dignified than death by hanging (except for traitors being shot in the back). In 1977, the first modern execution by firing squad was carried out in Utah (the state with a preponderance of Mormons, who are supposed to be staunch pacifists).

Gary Gilmore was the victim, and it was masterfully recounted by Norman Mailer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 work " The Executioner's Song." Then, in 1982, it was thought that the convulsions of the gas chamber and the electric chair, and the bloodiness of four rifle shots to the chest (the famous five shooters, one of them with a blank cartridge) could be subsumed into a new method, the " lethal injection": a powerful dose of tranquilizer, a muscle paralyzer, and a cardiac poison. Since then, 1,449 people (1,433 men, 16 women) have been killed with this system, less chaotic than previous ones, but not immune to errors and malfunctions: incorrectly inserted needles, expired and therefore less effective lethal drugs, ruptured veins, and various accidents.

In America, they're called "botched executions," and it's estimated there were around 70. Then, after a long period of claiming they couldn't track all the drugs they sold, pharmaceutical companies began imposing restrictions, and for about 15 years, it's become very difficult for prisons to purchase lethal drugs. So some states have considered returning to the old systems, albeit with a few small improvements: the gas chamber has been revived, but no longer with cyanide, but with nitrogen, which replaces all the oxygen molecules in the condemned person's blood (6 executions between 2024 and 2025). The electric chair has also been reintroduced (20 executions since 2000), and two shootings will be carried out in 2025. In the second of these, incredibly, paid volunteers missed their targets despite aiming their rifles from less than 4 meters away. Stress, anxiety, fear, last-minute second thoughts? The fact is that they're now considering replacing human shooters with mechanical devices.

Everyone has their own opinion: some imagine simple blacksmith's vices to lock rifles and remote-controlled triggers, others imagine electronic sights that perfectly target a microchip fixed to the condemned man's heart, and still others imagine (though from a technical standpoint, it would actually be easy to implement today) fully automated weapons mounted on tripods. As Mailer would have said, if the executioners begin to hesitate and sing out of tune, there are the sorcerer's apprentices, the politicians, who continue to come up with ideas on how to kill their fellow men. They won't do it, but we need a law that mandates politicians, certain politicians, to personally pull the trigger, whether traditional or remote-controlled. It would be interesting to see how many elections they win.

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Valerio Fioravanti