Fel club

Garrote at the Museum of Torture, in Fribourg of Brisgovia, Germany

The vil garrote or garrote was a machine used to apply capital punishment, commonly used by the Spanish Inquisition or by the Court of the Inquisition.

It was used in Spain and was legally in force from 1820 until the total abolition of the death penalty, approved by the Constitution of 1978. The last executions with this machine were those of Salvador Puig Antich and Heinz Chez in 1974, at the end of the Francoism. It was also used in the Spanish overseas territories Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Actuation mechanism

The «garrote» mechanism, in its most evolved form, consisted of an iron collar pierced by a screw ending in a ball. By turning it, it caused the victim to break his neck. Death was caused by dislocation of the odontoid process of the axis vertebra on the atlas in the cervical area of the spine.

If the injury produced crushes the medulla oblongata or ruptures the cervical spine with a medullary cut, a cerebral coma occurs and instantaneous death occurs. But this largely depends on the physical strength of the executioner and the resistance of the condemned man's neck. Experience showed that this was rarely the case, since death often occurred from strangulation resulting from injuries to the larynx and hyoid bone. In multiple cases, the agony of the condemned was prolonged. For example, the medical report on the execution of José María Jarabo in 1959 detailed that death had occurred "excessively slowly." The death took 25 minutes, after a true torture. Jarabo had a powerful neck and his executioner, Antonio López Sierra, was physically quite weak.

History

For a knife, Francisco de Goya drawing for the series The Disasters of Warwhere it represents the horror and cruelty experienced by the population during the French invasion of Spain (1809-1814). In this case, it shows a civilian adjusted by the Napoleonic authorities for the possession of a knife, a very common tool between the artisans and workers of the early nineteenth century.

Execution of Oliva Moncasi (author of an attack on King Alfonso XII of Spain) on January 4, 1879 at the Guards Camp of Chamberí

Photograph of the everylso of the four adjusted after the events of Jerez of 1892 by garrote vil.

Execution by bulldozer in the Philippines in 1901

The club (in Latin: laqueus) as an instrument of execution dates from the Roman Republic. It is known that, once Catiline's second rebellion was put down, Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura was strangled with other conspirators by means of the laqueus, as some bas-reliefs of the time reflect.

The adjective «vile» derives from the system of estate laws in the Middle Ages. For a symbolic reason, beheading with the sword was considered reserved for the nobility. On the other hand, for the "plebs" the "vulgar" execution by "garrote" was maintained. Subsequently, the execution by compression of the victim's neck was applied, with which the name was preserved.

The club was also used during the Middle Ages, both in Spain and Portugal. It was also used in America, particularly in the execution of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, in the city of Cajamarca, in 1533.

Later, the club was refined. The Catalan variant included an iron punch that penetrated the back and destroyed the cervical vertebrae.

«Exécution d'un assassin a Barcelone»Execution of a murderer in Barcelona), by Gustave Doré, published in L'Espagne, 1874

Hanging was considered excessively cruel, as the time to death was much longer. At the beginning of the 19th century, this argument proved valid and the club, with its refinements, was established as an execution mechanism. Subsequently, the English perfected the technique of hanging by long drop and trapdoor, which made this procedure faster and less cruel.

The use of the club became widespread throughout the XIX century, favored by the simplicity of its manufacture, which was at the reach of any blacksmith. By decree of April 24, 1832, King Ferdinand VII abolished the death penalty by hanging and replaced it with the use of the garrote:

I wish to reconcile the last and unavoidable rigor of justice with humanity and decency in the execution of the death penalty, and that the supposition in which the prisoners exposed their crimes does not irritate them infamy when for them they do not deserve it, I wish to point out with this benefit the great memory of the happy birthday of the Queen my beloved wife, and I come to abolish for ever in my rule the death penalty

Each type of execution involved a different staging. Each differed primarily in driving to the garrote. Those condemned to a noble garrote rode on a saddled horse, those with an ordinary garrote rode on a mule or horse, and those with a vile garrote on a donkey, seated facing the rump, or dragged. However, it is this last denomination that has prevailed. The execution was announced with some drums with a loose head, not tight, which were called "distempered boxes", from which the expression has remained.

Abolition

Garrote vil. Exhibition Inquisition in the Palace of the Forgotten of Granada

The last people to go through the garrote were the Catalan anarchist Salvador Puig Antich, in the Modelo Prison in Barcelona, and the common criminal Georg Michael Welzel (Heinz Chez) in Tarragona. Georg, of allegedly Polish origin, was actually German and his name was Georg Michael Welzel. His executions took place on March 2, 1974. In 1977, José Luis Cerveto Goig, "the murderer of Pedralbes", was sentenced to garrote for a double murder, although he was eventually pardoned. The last woman executed in Spain was Pilar Prades Expósito, in the Valencia prison in 1959.

In the Philippines, the death penalty by garrote was not abolished after it became a US colony in 1898. In Puerto Rico, at least four executions were carried out by this method before it became a US Commonwealth in 1952, although the death penalty was abolished in 1929 on the island. The last execution took place in 1926.

During the historical period known as the «Spanish transition» the death penalty was definitively abolished.

• In 1978 the "Project of the Law on the Abolition of the Death Penalty in the Common Criminal Code" was published. This is the precedent of Article 15 of Chapter II, Section 1.a, of the Spanish Constitution, which establishes the abolition of the death penalty "except what the military criminal laws may have for times of war".
• In 1983, the Reform of 25 June resulted in the disappearance of the death penalty for all offences in the Criminal Code.

Although the Spanish Constitution still maintains the formulation "except for what military criminal laws may provide for times of war", this possibility is not included in the Code of Military Justice. Since the Constitution is the supreme legal norm, Spanish legislation could still formulate or modify laws in this regard. In other words, in times of war the death penalty could be applied if legislation were passed to that effect.

Organic Law 11/1995, of November 27, which abolished the death penalty in wartime, came to complete the abolition and make it absolute.

Spain ratified Protocol No. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which establishes the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances, on December 16, 2009.