By the Neck Until Dead

A NEW HANDBOOK ON HANGING (179 pp.)--Charles Duff--Regnery ($3.50).

"It has been and still is a matter of opinion," writes British Author Charles Duff, "whether, if you wish to kill your undesirable, it is better to...flay him until he dies, or hurl him over a precipice; or burn him or drown or suffocate him; or entomb him alive...or asphyxiate him in a lethal chamber, or press him to death or cut off his head; or produce a sort of coma by means of an electric current... For my own part...I have reached the conclusion -- that no people can point to a method which is more beautiful and expeditious, or which is aesthetically superior to the time-honoured British practice of breaking their necks by hanging..."

Philosopher & Friend. Author Duff (who holds a law degree) argues that the public should be admitted to hangings, as it was in England until 1868, so that the people may share once more in Britain's "ancient and symbolical ritual." By selling film rights to hangings, the master executioners could be rewarded with more than their present fee (about $44 a knot). Moreover, says Duff, hangings should be broadcast for their highly dramatic sound effects, such as "the crack like a muffled shot of a small pistol which indicates the official breaking of the criminal's neck."

Hangmen, pleads Author Duff, are widely underrated: they are really artists. The good hangman must not only have a sharp eye and a clever touch; he must have personality and good stage presence, must feel at home with any class of people, and should be "capable of being the guide, philosopher and friend of whomsoever he must hang for us." In particular, Duff sings the praises of 19th century Hangman James Berry, who calculated precisely the length of rope needed to break the prisoner's neck with pulling the head off. Berry expressed this in a brilliant and still widely used equation which, at least in Author Duff's version runs thus:

412 ____________ = lenghth of drop weitht of the body in feet in stones

It may take the reader of this chilling little volume a while to catch on to the fact that Author Duff is not really writing in praise of hanging. He has, in fact, produced a devastating Swiftian satire against capital punishment.

Hemp Is Best. When the book first appeared in England in 1928, it started a storm of controversy, and a Royal Commission later recommended that the death penalty be abolished. After barely failing to vote a temporary end to capital punishent in 1948, Parliament may now debate the matter again, and Author Duff has brought his satire up to date with the latest technical information, plus international statistics. Though about half the nations of the U.N. have abandoned capital punishment, Britain, the Commonwealth and the "more enlightened states" of the U.S. "continue to hang." *

Author Duff maintains an insistent pitch of anger that makes the book as uncomfortable as it is meant to be, although the anger at times sounds almost old-fashioned in an age when the gallows take far fewer lives than more modern means of destruction. Author Duff will convince all but the most sadistic reader that the gallows are brutal, and that even the basest criminals are too good for hanging. But all he may accomplish is that reformers will propose some more efficient or humanitarian substitutes for the gallows--such as the neat old guillotine, the quick bullet in the back of the neck, or the concentration camp, where prisoners may die unhurriedly and without benefit of rope.

Nevertheless, the New Handbook makes gripping reading and is full of sleep-troubling facts about hangmanship, from an account of distinguished executioners who committed suicide to the sort of wood it is best to use for gallows (teak) to the best rope for hanging a man ( 3/4-in. rope of five strands of Italian hemp).

Some American readers may be piqued to find that Author Duff does not think much of U.S. hangmanship. Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the U.S. executioner at the Nuernberg war-crimes trials, was accused of bungling the job. "Wherever I look among accounts of American hangings," writes Duff, "I find something to indicate a certain lack of dispatch. Yet there is one great comfort: America's hanged die as certainly as England's."

* N.H., Iowa, Kans., Del., Md., Mont., Idaho, Wash. use the gallows. Utah offers the prisoner a choice of hanging or shooting. Thirty-three states execute by lethal gas, or electrocution. There is no capital punishment in Me., Mich., Wis., Minn., N. Dak., R.I. (but some of these states make exceptions in special cases, e.g., treason or, as in N. Dak., a first degree murder committed by a person already serving a life sentence for an earlier murder).

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