The death penalty is still very much alive

Despite the repeated intervention of international organisations, the death penalty is being handed down in courts in countries across the world, on a daily basis. Having faced the death sentence on several occasions, Tintin has direct experience of this dreadful punishment. Let us take a look at the origins, history and modern-day use of this brutal punitive measure.

Brought back into use in the United States in 1977, today capital punishment is common

In the year 2007 alone, some 1252 executions were recorded in 24 countries, and at least 3347 people were condemned to death in 51 countries. This figure is likely to be inaccurate as it does not take into account the many executions which take place outside of the public eye. The whole world seems to be implicated: the death penalty is not only a state-controlled punishment but is also practised by terrorists. Sometimes these executions are highly publicised such as the televised 'death sentence' (murder) of journalist Daniel Pearl by terrorists in Karachi, Pakistan, on 1 February 2002. Such spectacles highlight the general public's morbid fascination with death: the video of Daniel Pearl's murder was one of the most watched videos on the internet.

A public spectacle

The death penalty continues regularly to be handed down to prisoners. In 2007, Amnesty International was able to gather very detailed statistics. We learn that 470 executions took place in China. Iran imposed the death penalty on more than 317 people. Saudi Arabia killed 143 people, while in Pakistan the figure was 135. In America 42 people were executed. Iraq carried out capital punishment on 33 people and 25 people were killed by the state in Vietnam. Going to the bottom of the list, Ethiopia made a single known execution. Today most countries - China, Iran and Saudi Arabia aside - choose to carry out the death penalty quietly and not to make public spectacles out of such events. But until relatively recently, the beginning of the twentieth century, the decapitation of French prisoners drew huge crowds in France, while in England people turned out in force to see hangings. If we consider the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (1793), these were clearly major public affairs requiring event management on a scale today reserved for the likes of The X-Factor. Such spectacles are a tradition stretching back to the time of the Dark Ages. Grisly killings were considered to set an important example to the general public. It deterred crime and instilled fear, while also giving good folk the impression that justice was being done.

Church (both Catholic and Protestant). It was all too easy to denounce anyone who tried to introduce new ideas as a 'heretic', and to have them killed.

A catalogue of horror

The gruesome method of hanging, drawing and quartering also had its time. King Edward I of England executed the famous leader of the resistance during the Wars of Scottish Independence, William Wallace, in this manner. The condemned man was hanged for some time, although not enough time to kill him. His genitals were then cut off, and his body cut open. The executioner then removed his intestines with a pulley and burned them, before beheading him and cutting him into four parts. Wallace's head was stuck on a pole on London Bridge, and his limbs were sent to four different parts of the country as warnings. In the Middle Ages, counterfeiters were plunged into boiling oil. In England, Henry VIII made boiling a legal form of capital punishment, used to execute poisoners. It was specifically used in the case of John Roose, a cook for the Bishop of Rochester, who poisoned several people. Under King Louis XIV and King Louis XV, French judges condemned highwaymen to be 'broken on the wheel'. The prisoner was tied to a large wooden wagon wheel, with arms and legs spread-eagled. The executioner then smashed their limbs and bodies with cudgels. Execution by elephant was a common capital punishment for thousands of years in South and Southeast Asia, particularly India. Elephants were controlled by a rider and could be trained either to torture their victims slowly with spikes attached to their tusks, or to kill them immediately, often by crushing their heads. In China, slow slicing, or Ling Chi, was used as a way to execute people. 'The death by a thousand cuts' was carried out with the aid of a knife; small portions of the condemned were removed bit by bit.