Police bodycam shows officers handcuffing Henry Nowak as he lay dying Police have released bodycam footage showing officers handcuffing 18-year-old Henry Nowak as he lay dying. The BBC has chosen to remove the sound in parts of this video due to its distressing content. The footage from December showed his killer, Vickrum Digwa, claim he was racially abused by the teen and acted in self defence, which was a lie. He told officers his turban had been knocked off and said he had been injured. Police say they liaised with Henry Nowak's family before sharing the footage. It was also played in court. Digwa, 23, was jailed for life with a minimum of 21 years on Monday. He used a 21cm (8in) blade he said he carried as part of his Sikh faith to kill Nowak, who was walking home alone after a night out with friends in Southampton on 3 December. A judge dismissed racism claims made by Digwa. Speaking outside court, the victim's father, Mark Nowak, said the contrast between how his s...
Originally? Because it was the most painless way to kill someone. The inventor, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, was very clear about his intention to botched and painful executions.
In an era before firearms and pharmaceutical solutions, the quickest way to execute someone was to chop of their head. That, itself, was a nod to civility, as the alternative was something like hanging (which could result in slow strangulation) or other methods that were actually intended to be as long and painful as possible. Beheading might look gruesome, but it’s definitive and it’s quick. (People still argue over whether it’s actually painless or not, but it was clearly as quick a method as they had).
The problem was, you were depending on the skill of the headsman. Taking off someone’s head with a single blow is very difficult, and it wasn’t uncommon for executions to require more than one hit, and end up being unnecessarily traumatic for the condemned.
Now, in modern times, many people would take that as a reason to eliminate capital punishment. In the 18th century, the idea of not executing murderers would have bee considered shocking. But Guillotin was convinced it could be done better, and so invented a machine that would do it, consistently, effectively, and in a single blow every single time. Because it was so effective for this purpose, it was widely adopted.
As for why they continued to use it, the fact is, there are other methods that look cleaner, but none were implemented that were clearly more humane, and certainly none that were more effective. France officially abolished the death penalty in 1981, but their last execution (in 1977) was still by guillotine. What were the alternatives at that point? America, by then, was using the electric chair and the gas chamber, but both were relatively complicated methods which could be (and were) botched, resulting in a gruesome and painful death. 1977 was the same year that execution by lethal injection was first proposed in the US, but even if it had been an established method, it’s once again complex, with a lot of open questions (then and now) about how reliable and painless it actually is.
Bluntly, if you’ve determined that it’s appropriate to kill a human being, I respect the guillotine as a method, because it doesn’t try to hide from the reality. I mean, it’s messier than most methods, and makes an open casket funeral difficult, but it’s efficient, reliable, and likely to be as painless than any other method we’re likely to develop. If we’re unwilling to cut a person’s head off, maybe we should be unwilling to kill them in the first place.j
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