HANGING WAS THE METHOD OF EXECUTION IN THE UNITED STATES UNTIL THE MID TWENTIETH CENTURY.

hanging was the method of execution in the United States until the mid twentieth century. 

the last public hanging legally conducted in the United States, was that of Rainey Bethea, who was publicly hanged.

Hanging is the suspension of a person by a ligature, usually a noose or cord tied in a "Hangman's knot" wrapped around the neck, causing death. 

The knot in the noose is intended to jerk the victim's head back sharply enough to break the neck.

l Throughout history it has been used as a form of capital punishment. 

It was the usual method of execution in lynchings, and is also a common method of committing suicide.

While hanging, especially when carried out in public, is generally considered a rather inhumane method of execution it was the method of choice in numerous countries, particularly Great Britain and countries of the former British Empire for centuries.

 In its defense, several alternatives were more gruesome—drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, crucifixion, stoning, and so forth. Efforts were made to improve the hanging technique to ensure swift and painless death. 

In some countries efforts to be more humane resulted in a change in method of execution, the United States' use of the electric chair and lethal injection being notable. 

Others, such as Great Britain, abolished the death penalty itself; while still others continue with hanging as their method of execution, although the death penalty is rarely applied. 

Thus, from the history of attitudes toward the use of hanging can be seen a change from the extreme cases of "man's inhumanity to man" to increasing concern for the rights of all, even murderers, to receive humane treatment.

 The final conclusion of this advance, however, should be the end of violence against others and ourselves, and the ability of all to live in harmony as one human family.

Hanging is the oldest but most widely used method of execution in the world today, with over 300 people hanged during 2006, many in public. 

The first recorded use of judicial hanging is in the Persian Empire approximately 2,500 years ago.

[2] Along with widespread rejection of the death penalty as a punishment in many countries, hanging has come to be seen as a brutal method of execution.

 Formerly, hangings were conducted in public squares and used as a demonstration of the state's power and to embarrass the person being executed.

 Hangings were seen as a public spectacle, with people even using the occasion for a family picnic.[3]

It was the preferred method of execution in England for centuries, with public hangings until 1868. 

The use of hanging ended only with the abolition of the death penalty in 1964.

[4] Hanging was a method of execution employed by the Nazis during World War II.

In a newspaper interview in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev commented regarding the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution that "support by United States … is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man."

 [5] In keeping with the metaphor, the prime minister of Hungary during the revolution, Imre Nagy, was secretly tried, executed by hanging, and buried unceremoniously by the new Soviet-backed Hungarian government, in 1958. Nagy was later publicly rehabilitated by Hungary.[6]

Canada used hangings as its method of execution as late as 1962.[7] The Indian Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment would only be used in extreme cases.

[8] One such example is that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was convicted of the 1990 murder and rape of a 14 year old girl in Kolkata in India and was subsequently hanged.[9]

Hanging was the method of execution in the United States until the mid-twentieth century, and was commonly employed in lynchings. 

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. 

By the last decade of the twentieth century hanging had been replaced by lethal injection as the standard method of carrying out the death penalty in states which retained this punishment.

 Among those with the death penalty, only three states retained hanging as an option; this was exercised three times in the 1990s—Billy Bailey in Delaware in 1996, and Charles Rodman Campbell (1994) and Westley Allan Dodd (1993) in Washington. 

In the first decade of the twenty-first century only two states, New Hampshire and Washington, continued to allow hanging as an option.[10]

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