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117 comments on Peak Oil and the Environment Day 2 Part 1

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fleam on May 10, 2006 - 5:06am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Truthfully, I have a problem with the guys prosecuting him. He's selling pieces of wood, bolted together. And hanging is probably the least horrible way of dying over there. How about the Brit authorities take a close look at the companies and dictators they're doing business with first? No, they have to pick on a little guy to keep the public's attention away from their own much greater sins. If the Brit authorities wanted to actually do something, they'd try to stop the strife over there, but they don't want to alienate their best customers/clients/dirty work go-fers do they?
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totoneila on May 10, 2006 - 5:43am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hello Fleam,

Good points!  Hanging is a low cost, low profit, but an intensely low tech one-sided affair.  Much more profitable for the global arms industry to sell weaponry, to both sides in an African conflict, in exchange for their natural resources.  Then, just like Gillette Corp, there is much more money to be made selling replacement blades [bullets] than the initial razor [gun].  Isn't economics great!  =(

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

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fleam on May 10, 2006 - 6:20am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
But of course!

It's just the hypocrisy that gets to me, don't actually do anything about the evil, find some little guy who appears to be doing evil and squash him like a bug.

I myself have a natural distaste for the idea of making and selling gibbets, but there's quite a body of evidence (haha) that people who make such stuff are more interested in being humane, and have more empathy for the one to be hanged than those who gave the order for them to be.

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totoneila on May 10, 2006 - 7:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hello Fleam,

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?

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