The Oil Drum

I don't know if you watched the video interview of the farmer in my original link.  The included video link was a little erratic when I played it on my computer, but I believe the farmer mentioned how a well-designed gallows has a certain springiness to its operation.  I assume he means an optimal humane design incorporates this springiness to cleanly snap the spine vs just hanging there and slowly strangling to death.

Az has a good example of using sub-optimal hanging equipment:

http://www.geocities.com/zybt/globe.htm
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In a letter to a historian (Douglas D. Martin) a former reporter for the Phoenix Gazette, Jack Lefler, wrote the following about the 13 July 1936, execution:

The hanging of Earl Gardner was a very dramatic story and an exciting one to cover. . . . He was a juvenile delinquent and mean as hell, especially when loaded with tulapai. Marshal McKinney deputized everybody in sight, including reporters. We strutted the streets of Globe carrying rifles and stacking them in the corner of a bar when we went in for a drink. The gallows was an abandoned rock crusher in a canyon below Coolidge Dam. Earl was brought from the jail at Globe during the night and spent his last hours sitting in a car with the Rev. Uplegger. . . . I tried to interview them but they wouldn't talk. Reporters, officers and other witnesses lounged around campfires in the sandy bed of a wash through the night. There was quite a bit of boozing and horsing around. Earl went to the gallows without apparent concern and died a ghastly death. I was crouched in a corner of the crusher on a pile of gravel and damn near went through the trap after him. Earl's shoulder struck the side of the trap and broke his fall. He hung at the end of the rope gasping for 25 minutes until Maricopa County Sheriff Lon Jordan, a giant of a man, stepped down through the trap and put his weight on Earl's shoulder to tighten the noose and shut off his breathing.

The execution of Gardner by hanging was so ghastly that Congress passed a law stipulating that from henceforth all federal executions had to take place according to the manner "prescribed by the laws of the State within which the sentence is imposed." As the law in Arizona required that executions should be done by lethal gas (law passed in 1933), no more hangings were to be permitted in Arizona, not even on federally-supervised Indian reservations. Thus the Pinal Mountain region witnessed the last legal hanging ever permitted in Arizona.
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I believe some other state abolished hanging when a particularly obese subject's head was gruesomely separated from the body below.  Obviously, the Hangman, being a professional, was upset at this event, but it was the crowd going wild that precipitated the change to other forms of execution.

Bob Shaw in Phx,Az  Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?

Love your posts.  There's no way for a species to evolve a tendency for suicide.  Any individual with such an inclination will tend not to pass it on to his/her offspring.  On the other hand, an inclination to attack our fellows increases the chances for success of our genes in the pool.  It ain't pretty, it just is.  Daniel Quinn takes an interesting look at this, especially in "The Story of B"