A Hanging is a short story written by George Orwell. In it, he recounts an episode from his time as a police officer in Burma. He observes a criminal being executed. He is unmoved by what he sees, until he notices the condemned man side step to avoid a puddle as he is frog-marched to the gallows.
Orwell is struck by the humanity of this act and for the first time fully realises that it is a living breathing human being that is being put to death:
"It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man."
A drop of this distance was rarely sufficient to break the prisoner's neck and they died by strangulation although in a lot of cases were knocked unconscious by the force of the drop and the impact of the knot against the side of the neck.
The last public hanging was that of Rainey Bathea, at Owensboro, Kentucky on the morning of August 14, 1936 for the murder and rape of a 70 year old white woman.
Hanging with no or insufficient drop typically produces death by strangulation (asphyxia) due to the weight of the person's body pulling down on the noose, causing it to tighten and constrict the trachea (air passage) and applying pressure to the large blood vessels in the neck.
For this reason hanging is especially popular in prisons.
The last public hanging legally conducted in the United States (and also the last public execution in the United States) was that of Rainey Bethea, who was publicly hanged on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky.
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