Botched Executions: the rope, the gun, the chair, the chamber & the needle: & other crime stories

SINCE TIME BEGAN, man has found ways to put people to death. Winston Churchill wanted to execute Adolf Hitler – who he described as the “mainspring of evil” - like a gangster in an electric chair borrowed from the US, but he never got the chance.
Ancient methods of execution included boiling people to death in tar, throwing the convicted onto sharp stakes in the ground and slow crucifixion.
But are modern methods of execution any more humane? Whatever your views on the “rights and wrongs” of capital punishment, it is astonishing how many botched executions have taken place over the years.
Today, almost 60 countries maintain the death penalty both in law and in practice; including: China, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Japan, North and South Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, most central African states and the USA.
But as you will see here - from hanging to the firing squad, from the gas chamber to lethal injection - man has not yet to invented a fail-safe or “humane” method of putting the condemned to death.