Does the prisoner feel pain where the drop is sufficient to break their neck?
Obviously no one can be sure but it is generally held that if the person does feel pain, it is only during the instant that their neck is broken which can be measured in fractions of a second (see below). Those who witnessed 20th century British hangings never described any obvious suffering on the part of the prisoner and the two post-mortem reports that are available do not seem to indicate anything but a quick death. There were no signs of conscious suffering in the independently witnessed hangings of Westley Allan Dodd and Charles Campbell in Washington and Billy Bailey in Delaware. Although death was not instantaneous (it never is) unconsciousness was. These were the last hanging executions in the USA. According to Harold Hillman, a British physiologist who has studied executions, “the dangling person probably feels cervical pain, and suffers from an acute headache, as a result of the rope closing off the veins of the neck. It had been generally assumed that fracture-dislocation o
