A Saudi court has reviewed and upheld the sentence of a 22-year-old man to be beheaded and crucified for the raping of five children. It is the latest medieval measure from the Saudi Sharia courts.
There is little sympathy of the man who was found guilty of raping five children and leaving one to die in the desert.
However, Saudi Arabia continues to mete out cruel and unusual forms of punishment. In this case, the body of the man will be displayed in public, a practice that has previously caused international expressions of outrage and disgust, here and here.
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I am disenchanted now with our entire effort to liberate the muslim world. Why? Because we condone crucifixions and post crucifixion glee club photography of american soldiers with dead frozen, corpses. I come from hell and I look forward to your end.
The death penalty is frequently justified as a necessary corollary to reverence for life. If that is the case, the execution of a human being, regardless of the crime, should be conducted with dignity and respect. The beheading and subsequent public display of a condemned person describes a society governed by spiritual coarseness, cultural vulgarity and mindless authoritarianism.
I don’t see the problem.
Granted hanging and leaving ghe body up there for a few days would be less messy and just as effective, but still….
Maaarrghk!,
All of the tapes and photos I saw were clean cuts, which, by the way, would allow the head the longest time possible to survive after separation as it is less traumatic than hacking away which probably induces shock before death. Any curved blade is going to have more power on the down stroke compared to a straight blade. That’s just physics. The force focuses to the apogee of the curve. And scarily enough, that didn’t require any research. I know more about swords than is probably good for me.
Buddha.
I certainly admire the depth of your technical research into the matter, but please don’t tell me about your childhood. đŸ™‚
I remember seeing a copy of “Paris Match” magazine while at school about 30 years back. They did a complete series of about a dozen photo’s of a Saudi beheading. Photos were taken from the raising of the sword to a couple of seconds after the striking of the blow.
The guys head came off cleanly in a single blow and the sword was quite a large scimitar shape of blade. I wonder if it was manufactured to work in the same way as a samuri sword which is designed to kill by a clean cut.
I was only about 13 at the time and remember wondering why an English Grammar school would we purchasing stuff like that just so that O-Level French students had something to help their studies – maybe Asterix or Tin Tin would have been more appropriate!
Byron,
Swords do make a clean job of it, however, a blow to the back of the neck by by a medium weight sword is not in itself probably enough to knock a man out. Keep in mind that in this part of the world there were no heavy broad swords traditionally. They tend to use kopech and scimitar designs which are similar in heft to cutlass or a calvary sabre. A “flat” blow is probably the best way to judge the concussive force of a blow as it allows the most contact area. A “straight” cut would be technically a more powerful blow. This is a slashing weapon. Being knocked out is not usually a result in beheading because the mass of the blade combined with the strength of the swordsman doesn’t usually carry enough force to make your brain smack into the side of your skull from the inside (this is what causes the knock out phenomena). This is why I say a flat of the blade strike is a better shot for knocking someone out. The force in a flat strike, being decentralized, pushes at more of the brain than a cut would. Even then you are talking a blow TO the head. The issue here is a blow to the neck.
There are basically four ways to kill someone from the strikes to the neck – 1) damage to the trachea/esophagus, 2) damage to the carotid artery or jugular vein 3) damaging the spinal column and 4) decapitation (which requires a tool unless you are a real REAL bad ass – and I mean so bad as to be practically Conan-like fictional). Any decent sword (with the exception of stabbing weapons like a Gladius) is able to do any of these and the first three a trained person can do with their hands alone. As I’ve said before, killing people is easy but hurting them precisely and then controlling their movement is much trickier and requires training. The only way I can envision a knockout this way is if the executioner used a a heavy sword like a Claymore which my virtue of its weight and size might actually impart enough force to the skull to cause concussion. Even then, it’d require a really bad executioner with a poor aim who hit toward the base of the skull (the wrong place to cut if you want to decapitate cleanly by about 3 or 4 vertebra, you want as little bone in the way as possible). All of this also assumes that the blade is sharp. Need I say more than Mary Queen of Scots? How would you like to be awake for that? No, while a remote technical possibility for a decapitation to cause a knockout exists, it’s unlikely as not enough force transfers to the brain case through the neck to move the brain hard and fast enough to cause a concussion and the resulting knockout.
Buddha:
Does a sword make a clean job of it? I have heard the brain does stay conscious for a certain amount of time after beheading, but I would think the blow to the back of the neck would cause you to black out or at least severely disorient.
In any event as we have discussed before, the death penalty is a waste of money and there seems to be a number of innocent people that are wrongly killed.
Gary T.
You hit the nail nicely on the head in your last paragraph regarding the fundamental problem with capital punishment. Eventually you are bound to get the wrong man.
As other posters seem to agree, beheading may actually be a fairly “humane” form of death (providing in this case it comes before the crucifixion). So the guy actually suffers for a fairly short time, unlike his victims.
I’m sure there are better options available without descending to judicial murder. The guy can be made to suffer for the rest of his natural life at the hands of the rest of the prison population.
Well, what’s there to say?
Beheading seems a bit gruesome for everyone but the beheadee. I agree, it would be maybe 5seconds of consciousness then total blackout.
(I’ve always wondered about who made the engineering decision to put the brain on a stalk outside the body, with a thin boney shell as protection. Idiotic is what it is. If I were the designer, I would put the brain in the middle of the torso, with a minimum 1/4″ thick casing around it.)
As to the fairness of the trial? I would really like to believe he is guilty of these charges aforehand. But if he is, I have NO pity for the fraker.
Think of fear and suffering he caused in total innocents.
If he did these crimes, it doesn’t bother me one bit.
Do they crucify first and then behead?
Or do they behead, and then crucify?
I never know what to expect from Sharia Law.
It’s a wonderful club we Americans belong to, along with Saudi Arabia, we’re in the Capital Punishment Club with fine nations like Iran and North Korea.
Come to think of it, don’t all the “Axis of Evil” nations use Capital Punishment?
Good point seamus. And, they are very well armed too thanks to our govt.! What’s not to like?
I can’t really tell from the article if the boy who helped the police was a victim or just a witness. If the victims where girls it seems Saudi law would have allowed the rape if he’d married them first.
So is he really being beheaded for being a pedophile and a rapist? Or is he being beheaded for being gay? Or is he being beheaded for being a fornicator? Or is he being beheaded for failing to pay the parents for an arranged marriage prior to the rape? Those crazy Saudis, they always keep me guessing. That’s why they’re so much fun!
Byron,
I’ve made no secret I hate pedophiles. But have you ever actually seen a beheading? I have as part of my study of international comparative law. Stills and video. Beheading is the very definition of barbaric and cruel. You know the head can live on for a bit without the body, right? I don’t give a damn what your crime is, you shouldn’t kill someone and then allow them time to ruminate on the experience. Kill them and be done. To do otherwise? You might as well have earned the karmic stain of torturing them to death in the long form. The Russians prefer a bullet to the back of the head and I have to agree. Kill them if you have to, but beheading is a form of torture. Don’t get me wrong – if I were still for the death penalty pedophiles top my list. But that’s not the way to do it.
Why do westerners have such an aversion for beheading? I certainly dont like the idea but it is probably fairly painless, you black out within a few seconds due to 0 blood pressure. Although if it takes a couple of whacks, I think cruel and unusual fits the bill.
I just dont have much sympathy for a man that rapes 5 children and kills one.
But it is barbarous by western standards. Life in prison in a Saudi jail may actually be worse than death.
So far 40 have been executed this year? Seems like they are exceeding the limits, oh there is not a limit. I am sorry. Texas has not one either. Seems a little academic to be “beheaded and crucified for the raping of five children.
Dead is dead and talk will talk. I just hope he had a fair trial and he really did the crime sentenced to die for.