Pop
In the latest lynching… er… hanging carried out by our democratically elected allies in the Iraqi government, one of the criminals had his head yanked clean off. Reuters reports that some “Arabs” are crying foul, while the spokesman for our democratically elected allies in the Iraqi government claims it was “the will of God.”
Actually, as Slate.com’s Explainer explained back in November, they probably just botched their weight-of-prisoner : length-of-rope ratio:
The trick to a successful hanging is to have the victim drop an appropriate distance through a trapdoor before the rope goes taut against his neck. If he drops too far, he’ll have picked up so much speed that the noose might decapitate him. If he doesn’t drop far enough, he could remain conscious as he slowly strangles to death. But if you get the “drop” just right, the knot of the noose will snap against his neck—and either kill him or knock him unconscious.
The last major innovation in hanging occurred toward the end of the 19th century, when executioners first developed a systematic way to calculate the drop. Once these “drop tables” were published, a hangman knew that he’d need 7 feet for a slight, 120-pound criminal, but only about 4 feet for a 200-pounder.
See? The West is an advanced culture. We figured out a mathematical way to kill a man without popping his head off. Those savages in Iraq could learn something.