Hanging In A Hanging

The Normality of Death by Hanging

In George Orwell’s, A Hanging, he describes his experience of the execution of a Hindu man in Burma, while serving as an Imperial police officer. While he describes the scene and prisoner’s execution as inhumane and brutal, it was normal to the surrounding people. By publicly taking away someone’s life while it had just begun and is in full motion, is inhumane, brutal, and sadly customary.

Hanging has been used to punish criminals who committed infractions such as: treason, marrying Jewish people and lying about a crime (Death Penalty Information Center, 2018). Even though death is normally seen as a tragedy, people often celebrated these executions, watching the criminals fall to their quick death without

It began in the U.S. with a Spanish spy named George Kendall, being the first of many to be hung. Since there are multiple types of hanging used for executions, determined by your size and body figure, death by hanging can be a slow and painful death. As seen in execution videos from Iran, the condemned are still alive for 10 seconds after they are dropped to their death; however, their body still twitches and yanks back and forth for up to three to six minutes afterwards (Cohn, 2016). Orwell continues to describe the living conditions the convicted were in as, “a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like animal cages” (1931). The convicts were treated as if they were unhuman, like animals being sent to the slaughter house.

Equally important, Orwell soon realizes what it means to take someone’s life from them. While amongst the gallows, he follows the prisoner, watching his muscles move and his knees bend, noticing the man step aside to avoid a puddle in his pathway. Until this point, he had never realized the inhumanity that went into ceasing someone’s life. He continued on to describe how the man’s body was still at work, his stomach digesting food, his hair and nails continuing to grow; however, within the next two or so minutes, one man in their group would be gone, “one mind less, one world less” (Orwell,