Cruel and Unusual Death: Difference between revisions
Content deleted Content added
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) italics and grammar in new example |
→Real Life: Adding examples |
||
Line 560:
* Spiders inflict this on their prey. Spiders don't just "suck the liquids out. They ''inject the prey with acid, which dissolves the bug's insides.'' They then suck out the resulting goop.
* Lobsters get boiled alive...but this is a ''merciful'' death compared to how you ''broil'' lobsters; tie their claws down, slit them open with a knife and then put them into the oven while they're still alive.
* Burning at the stake is well-known in fiction as a form of execution for witches, and was known to be Joan of Arc’s fate, but fiction leaves out the gory details. Done mostly to women for serious crimes (in cases where rules of public decency prohibited the form of execution given to men) burning was a slow and painful death from shock, blood loss, or heatstroke (though when condemned were burned as groups, some might die of carbon monoxide poisoning before the flames got to them). This was a favoured method of Henry VIII's elder daughter, "Bloody" Mary I, who killed hundreds of English Protestants this way.
* From the Middle Ages to the 19th Century, execution by elephant was a favored method in Southeast Asia for rebellion, tax evasion, or theft, as it was symbolic of a ruler's power, even over nature. Elephants are rather easy to train, so depending on the whims of the ruler, this form of execution was either an Inversion, where the condemned man's death was mercifully quick (the elephant swiftly crushing the skull) or played horribly straight, the elephant being trained to prolong the unfortunate victim's agony by slowly crushing him.
* [[Flaying Alive|Flaying,]] when a victim is skinned alive, literally, has been done by the Aztecs to prisoners of war, to traitors in medieval Europe and by some Chinese emperors, again to POWs. While no longer legal in any part of the world, there was an incident in 2000 where Burmese troops flayed every male inhabitant of the village of Karenni. Generally, an attempt is made to keep the victim alive while removing the skin in one piece, causing death by shock, blood loss, hypothermia, or infection, often days afterwards. Saint Bartholomew is generally said to have been martyred this way.
{{reflist}}
| |||