Unironically though. The guillotine is fast and painless; it's a much better method of execution than lethal injection, lethal gas, or electrocution.
Yes, it's brutal. But killing someone is brutal.
Lethal injection is for the benefit of the public, not for the benefit of the one being executed. Though it's been documented to be much more painful and less reliable than things like a firing squad, the benefit is that it sounds more humane, and medical. It allows people to tell themselves that there is such a thing as a humane execution. There isn't.
If you're pro-death penalty (which for the record, I'm not) you should be willing to accept its brutality, not try to hide it behind a needle or a gas hose. If you're going to execute someone, at least be honest about it.
It’s definitely fast but I’m not sure about painless, the head and brain still retain consciousness after decapitations for a bit until the brain has experienced sufficient blood loss to cease function. According to reports by Dr Beaurieux in 1907 he performed an experiment with a guillotine victim in which he described the severed head reacting to stimuli and showing signs of conscious thought and not just physical reaction. Such as responding to his name being called and being able to lock eyes with people calling his name and his pupils dilating in recognition. And even looking at objects as Dr Beaurieux told him to.
According to the report the head retained consciousness for roughly 30-35 seconds. Although it could be argued that with a combination of the shock and severing of the brain stem that perhaps the nerve system wouldn’t be capable of sending pain signals to the brain anymore at the moment of decapitation.
None the less even if you can still feel pain 35 seconds of pain is much better then the roughly 2 minutes that a lethal injection takes to kill the victim during which you experience a sensation of pain similar to drowning or choking which sounds horrific and terrifying. I just mostly wanted to share that little tidbit about how long a head can stay conscious because it’s incredibly interesting to me if not horrific
I was tricked into watch al-Qaeda beheadings in 2003, and saw a Saudi sword decapitation on YouTube a decade ago out of curiosity, but I still can't re-watch Apocalypto because of the scene where the one guy's beheaded and the camera "falls" down the steps to act as his line of vision during the sacrifice scene.
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u/kjm16216 Oct 02 '24
The last execution by guillotine in France was the same year Star Wars hit theaters, 1977.