I know it’s a terrible thing that a woman went through lethal injection twice this week and just started snoring. It’s pretty awful. But it probably would have been worse to die. These are the people the death penalty didn’t work on, ranked.
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Romell Broom, Ohio, 2009. Two hours, eighteen needle sticks, no vein. At one point he rolled onto his side and was sliding the rubber tubing up his own arm to help them, which I have done for a nurse, patting my arm and saying this one’s usually good, and I was only there for bloodwork. They took a break. The governor gave him a one-week reprieve that lasted eleven years. He wrote a book called Survivor on Death Row and then died of Covid.
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John Lee, 1885. The hangman tested the trapdoor that morning and it worked. They stood Lee on it, pulled the lever, nothing. They took him off, tested it, it worked. They did this three times. Lee said he’d dreamed the night before that it would fail three times. He got life, was out in 22 years, sold his story to a newspaper, and they made a silent movie about him. He’s above Broom because he was at least standing on the thing, but he never dropped, and I think it only counts if they drop.
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Joseph Samuel, Sydney, 1803. He dropped. The first rope snapped. The second one unraveled slowly until his feet were on the ground and he was just standing there. The third one snapped. The governor said it was God and gave him life. They tested the ropes afterward and the ropes were fine. Three years later he stole a boat to escape and was never seen again.
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John Smith, London, Christmas Eve, 1705. He was a burglar. He hung for fifteen minutes while the crowd yelled for a reprieve, which is a different thing from a rope breaking, and then one showed up and they cut him down. He told people the dying was fine, a big blaze of light went out through his eyes and the pain stopped, and that coming back hurt so much he wished the people who cut him down had been hanged. I think about that when my foot falls asleep. He was arrested twice more and got off both times, and then in 1727 they got him for stealing a padlock and sent him to Virginia. He asked if he could be whipped instead.
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William Duell, 1740. He was sixteen. He hung for twenty minutes, they declared it, and they delivered him to the surgeons. The guy washing the body for dissection noticed it was breathing. Two hours later he was sitting up in a chair, and by midnight he was back in prison. The next morning he ate breakfast and asked for his mother. He didn’t remember being hanged. He said he’d had a dream about paradise. They sent him to America.
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Wenseslao Moguel, 1915. Firing squad, no trial. Eight bullets, and then an officer walked up and put one more in his head from close range, which is the one that exists for exactly this. He crawled away after they left. He lived another sixty years, went on the Ripley’s radio show in 1937, and there are photos of him in a suit. Chumbawamba wrote a song about him. Everyone else on this list had something break, a rope or a door or a vein. With him nothing broke. Everything worked and he just left.
And now, the top 3, where the women and their stories top the ones you’ve just read by exactly how much you can imagine.
