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Two of Saddam Hussein's aides were hanged before dawn on Monday, the Iraqi government said, admitting that the head of his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was also ripped from his body during the execution.

On the defensive after international uproar over sectarian taunts during the illicitly filmed hanging of the ousted president two weeks ago, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh insisted there was "no violation of procedure" during the executions of Barzan and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander.

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Malaysia Star

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After Saddam was hanged amid sectarian taunts captured on film, the United Nations urged Iraq to reconsider further death sentences and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, an opponent of capital punishment, said last week he thought there should be a delay in executing the other two condemned men.

Talabani left the country on Sunday to visit Syria.

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It may be called the "gallows science," but as yesterday's botched execution of Saddam Hussein's half-brother shows, it's a very imprecise one.

"There's no slide rule, no formula. It's, at best, a guess, and sometimes things happen," Dr. D. P. Lyle, a cardiologist and crime writer, said of the gruesome, shocking video shown to journalists of Barzan Ibrahim's hooded-head shorn from his body.

"The goal, when you hang someone, is to crack the neck, sever the spinal cord like a guillotine, but not decapitate."

A "good hanging" is supposed to deprive the brain of oxygen quickly.

Former Singapore hangman Darshan Singh, whose identity was revealed in 2005, once said that experience helps. He did more than 800 hangings.

"With me, [the prisoners] don't struggle. If [the executioner] is a raw guy, they will struggle like chickens, like fish out of the water."

Despite the potential for such problems, hanging was a legal form of punishment in 58 countries as of 2005, according to Amnesty International. No one knows how many are bungled.
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Prof. Sarat, author of When the State Kills, said that even if the length of the rope is misjudged there are bad results: strangulation, which could be agonizingly slow, or decapitation.

"It's a barbaric and offensive form of execution," he said in an interview.

Dr. Harold Hillman, an expert in executions who teaches at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, has written that the victim is likely to suffer severe pain from stretching the skin, strangulation and dislocation of the neck "and is unable to cry out because of the rope around the vocal cords."

He says that hanging is a very cruel way of killing people.
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Dr. Hillman has said that it is not known how long a person feels pain, but in rats about seven minutes elapses between neck dislocation and stopping the heart.
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Hanging is still a popular method of judicial execution, and is practiced or legally allowed in the following jurisdictions:

St. Lucia, Delaware, Japan, Bahamas, St. Vincent and Grenadines, St. Kitts and Nevis, South Africa, Singapore, Washington, New Hampshire.

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When capital punishment was legal in Canada, guess what it was? Hanging!

Interesting tidbit: a distant cousin of someone I know was one of the last people to be capitally punished in Canada, in 1956. The very last person was in 1962 at the Don Jail in Toronto.