Author Archives: Headsman

1829: William Maxwell, the last hanged for sodomy by the Royal Navy

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On this date in 1829, boatswain William Maxwell became the last British Navy sailor ever hanged for sodomy.

He’d been condemned only two days previous by a bare-bones Admiralty court at the Simon’s Town naval base at the Cape of Good Hope; his charge was buggery upon one of the ship’s boys of the 28-gun frigate HMS Tweed. This accuser, William Pack, was supported by four other boys from the Tweed alleging “uncleanness and other scandalous actions in corruption of good manners” which certainly described Pack’s experience as well.

“On the third daay after he joined the Tweed, he summoned Pack to his cabin on the larboard side of the lower deck,” we find in B. Burg’s Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy, which has an extensive narrative of the case* —

and, as the boy explained, “he then throwed me down on the deck. He then hauled my trousers down … He then turned to put his pintle into my backside. I felt him do all this. He hurt me very much.” … The boy continued his testimony by detailing four additional instances when he had been sodomized by Maxwell. The occurrences were all much the same. Pack added only that the boatswain neither used alcohol nor offered him money after he forced his attentions on him.

In an affecting detail that doesn’t appear to have carried any special legal import, Pack had diligently tallied his assaults in chalk on a mainmast hoop.

The other four boys’ allegations fell a bit short of violent rape but still followed a pattern of aggressive approaches by Maxwell shortly after the youth came aboard, with pretty obvious intent. The boatswain wanted to “do a dirty trick with me,” one said. Another euphemized the deed as “poking him about.” Citing fear of flogging or doubt that their claims would be believed, these boys hadn’t reported Maxwell — and indeed the panel pressed all of the witnesses on whether they’d been receiving gifts from Maxwell, suggesting a more reciprocal arrangement.

These private and unmentionable acts formed a difficult class of crime for the judiciary, and Maxwell knew it.** Much of his defense is taken up attacking the credibility of these boys — their questionable and perhaps interested testimony, and legal scholars who by 1829 counseled as one to err heavily towards caution in such difficult-to-prove cases.

He impugned Pack’s testimony, honing in on inconsistencies between different statements during a direct cross-examination that must have been dramatic for all involved. It didn’t work.

The youth of the victims, according to Burg, didn’t particularly exacerbate the crime in the eyes of Maxwell’s judges nor in general throughout the Navy; he wasn’t being read as a pedophile, but as a sodomite who happened to find the ship’s boys the easiest prey. This indeed they commonly were, occupying the very bottom of a ship’s hierarchy, but the same vulnerable stature also cut against their credibility as accusers since it made them liable to threats or cajoling to supply false accusations, or simply to the impetuosity of childish malice. Absent sterling character testimonials from other mariners, they carried scant weight as witnesses even in multiples; in an 1805 case, the judges who convicted a man named Barrett Ambler had put into the Admiralty for a pardon because they disliked “condemn[ing] a man to death, upon the evidence of four boys, the eldest not more than thirteen years of age.”

But no matter the evidence, the time for outright executing same-sexers was coming to an end in Britain. Even in the ranks of the Navy there had been no such punishment meted out since 1816. That was just weeks after (and for actions committed during) the Napoleonic Wars. But perhaps the ensuing era of peace helped more lenient attitudes take hold permanently — for until Maxwell, no Briton had swung for sodomy in the peacetime Navy in many decades.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the number of buggery trials was directly related to whether or not England was at war. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763), there were few trials and no executions for sodomy. Between 1756 and 1806, as Table 5 shows, fear and assiduous prosecution of sexual deviance was a wartime phenomenon. (Arthur Gilbert, “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976))

* I have not been able to locate the original 62-page court record anywhere online.

** He knew it because he’d previously been prosecuted for buggery — in fact, sentenced to death and then spared. Although he had no barrister at his last and fatal trial, he’d enjoyed legal assistance during his previous brush and ably deployed what he learned. It’s hard not to think that everyone’s awareness of this previous proceeding helped to shape the outcome of his second trial.

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546: Croesus

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It was perhaps around the winter outset of 546 BCE that the Lydian king Croesus was captured and executed or spared by the Persians.

Famed for his wealth — he funded the construction of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders* — Croesus was heir to a 600-year-old empire dominating western Anatolia. Herodotus credits the Lydians as the inventors of coinage, a likely basis for the “rich as Croesus” expression.

Would that he had been so rich in wisdom.

In perhaps 547 BCE, Croesus launched a war against the rising power on his eastern border — the Persian Achaemenid Empire, led by Cyrus the Great. In a classic ancient own-goal, Croesus got the thumbs-up for this adventure from the Oracle of Delphi, who told the Lydian envoys that if Croesus fought Persia, he would destroy a great empire.** That empire turned out be his own.

After fighting to a stalemate in the autumn of 547, Croesus retired to his capital of Sardis to winter, believing war would abate with the end of the campaigning season — even dismissing his allies until the spring.

Cyrus surprised him instead, marching aggressively on Sardis and putting it to siege after routing a much larger Lydian army at the Battle of Thymbra.† It wasn’t long before the Persians found an ill-defended entrance into the city’s citadel via a mountain ascent, and fulfilled the Pythian priestess’s prophecy.

We have no certain record of Croesus’s actual fate; the histories for him come from later Greeks, whose accounts are contradictory and even folklorish; J.A.S. Evans suggests in a 1978 scholarly exploration that the Greeks were equally in the dark about the matter but that “Croesus had become a figure of myth, who stood outside the conventional restraints of chronology.”

Herodotus renders his version thus, turning the action on Croesus’s remembrance of a previous encounter with the Greek wise man Solon, who had counseled him that wealth is not happiness:

The Persians gained Sardis and took Croesus prisoner. Croesus had ruled fourteen years and been besieged fourteen days. Fulfilling the oracle, he had destroyed his own great empire.

The Persians took him and brought him to Cyrus, who erected a pyre and mounted Croesus atop it, bound in chains, with twice seven sons of the Lydians beside him. Cyrus may have intended to sacrifice him as a victory-offering to some god, or he may have wished to fulfill a vow, or perhaps he had heard that Croesus was pious and put him atop the pyre to find out if some divinity would deliver him from being burned alive. So Cyrus did this.

As Croesus stood on the pyre, even though he was in such a wretched position it occurred to him that Solon had spoken with god’s help when he had said that no one among the living is fortunate. When this occurred to him, he heaved a deep sigh and groaned aloud after long silence, calling out three times the name “Solon.” Cyrus heard and ordered the interpreters to ask Croesus who he was invoking … He explained that first Solon the Athenian had come and seen all his fortune and spoken as if he despised it. Now everything had turned out for him as Solon had said, speaking no more of him than of every human being, especially those who think themselves fortunate.

While Croesus was relating all this, the pyre had been lit and the edges were on fire. When Cyrus heard from the interpreters what Croesus said, he relented and considered that he, a human being, was burning alive another human being, one his equal in good fortune.

In addition, he feared retribution, reflecting how there is nothing stable in human affairs. He ordered that the blazing fire be extinguished as quickly as possible, and that Croesus and those with him be taken down, but despite their efforts they could not master the fire.

Then the Lydians say that Croesus understood Cyrus’ change of heart, and when he saw everyone trying to extinguish the fire but unable to check it, he invoked Apollo, crying out that if Apollo had ever been given any pleasing gift by him, let him offer help and deliver him from the present evil.

Thus he in tears invoked the god, and suddenly out of a clear and windless sky clouds gathered, a storm broke, and it rained violently, extinguishing the pyre.

Even in this one text, Cyrus both does and does not execute Croesus, a figure whose proportions of historicity and legend are impossible to measure. In different variants of this tragic fall, Croesus puts up his own pyre for desperate self-immolation like the Steward of Gondor …

… or it is or is not successfully extinguished. A post-pyre Croesus then goes on to become a dutiful slave of Cyrus, the relationship of conquered and conquering kings full of aphorism and fable-ready vignettes with no dependable historical warrant.

* For the pedants in the room, the “Seven Wonders” roster was composed later in antiquity, and the Temple of Artemis made the list based on its rebuild version after the one put up by Croesus had been torched by the fame-seeking Herostratus.

** Croesus rated the Delphic oracle’s advice highly. Aesop, the fable guy got himself executed by the Delphians by misbehaving while in the course of delivering a tribute from Croesus.

† Allegedly, the unnerving sight of Cyrus’s camels arrayed for battle panicked the Lydian cavalry into flight.

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1745: William Hook

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From the London Evening Post, Jan. 5-8, 1745:

COUNTRY NEWS. Canterbury, Jan. 5. Yesterday William Hook, the notorius Housebreaker, &c. was executed here in the Presence of a prodigious Croud of Spectators. He behav'd in a very decent manner, and said he did not desire a farther Reprieve, and chose rather to be hang'd than transported, if he had had Friends to have gain'd that Favour for him. The Robberies he confess'd amounted to near seventy, committed by him (alone) in this City, its Neighbourhood, Sandwich and Chatham, in about fourteen Years.

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1667: Pedro Bohorquez, Inca Hualpa

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Spanish adventurer Pedro Bohorquez — better known as Inca Hualpa, a title he asserted for himself based on his final racket pretending to be an Incan prince — was garroted in Lima on this date in 1667 after a

“[A]t once simple and astute, timid and audacious, quick to form plans, but slow in their execution, without principles, but effective in persuasion, and particularly fortunate in making his wild talk pleasing to many persons of discretion,” Bohorquez hailed from Andalusia but made his mark in the New World with his want of gold and scruple.

“Bohorquez’s deeds are clouded by the contradictions of colonial documents,” write Michael Brown and Eduardo Fernandez in War of Shadows: The Struggle for Utopia in the Peruvian Amazon, a volume whose concern is laying the historical backstory of the Ashaninka people prior to a 1965 rebellion.

Around 1620, the eighteen-year-old Bohorquez left the poverty of Andalucia to seek his fortune in Peru. He lived in relative obscurity until his arrival in Lima in 1637 with a group of highland Indians who claimed to know the location of the fabulously wealthy kingdom of Paititi. The viceroy authorized an expedition in search of the city but excluded Bohorquez from the expedition’s ranks. The venture met with disaster and Bohorquez was held responsible …

A temporary setback only, for our picaro. Later, from 1645 to 1651,

Bohorquez apparently exploited the competition between the Franciscan and Dominican orders to obtain Dominican support for his expedition to Salt Mountain. During the months he and his band of freebooters controlled the settlement of Quimiri, they rustled cattle from nearby highland communities, murdered a native headman, abused the wives of Ashaninka converts, and abducted Indian children for use as servants. Eventually Bohorquez’s men soured on their fruitless search for gold and came within a hair’s-breadth of killing their leader. He was taken to Valdivia and imprisoned, but it was too late for the Dominicans: the Bohorquez reign of terror had undone four years of Dominican missionary work among the Ashaninka, all of whom fled Quimiri.

… escaping from prison yet again in 1656, he crossed the Andes to the Calchaqui Valley, where he persuaded 25,000 Indians that he had come to restore the Inca Empire. His tenure as the Son of the Sun lasted until 1659, when the Spanish arrested him because of their unhappiness with the rebellious behaviour of his Calchaqui vassals. Bohorquez languished in prison until January 3, 1667, when the authorities garroted him in his cell at midnight.

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1959: Joaquin Casillas Lumpuy, Batista regime soldier

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Joaquin Casillas Lumpuy, an officer of Cuba’s defeated Batista regime, died on this date in 1959 — either executed, or killed in a struggle trying to escape his executioners. (Both reports, amounting to the same thing, went abroad.)

Casillas most “distinguished” himself by carrying out the Batista dictatorship’s 1948 murder of trade unionist Jesus Menendez.* He served a token jail sentence for his trouble.**

Restored to his situation, Casillas was called upon to defend Fulgencio Batista once again in the last days of 1958 at the Battle of Santa Clara — what would prove to be the decisive battle clinching the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The battle was won on New Year’s Day, and Casillas captured that day by revolutionary commander Che Guevara.

“The sources contradict each other concerning names and numbers,” writes Paco Ignacio Taibo in Guevara, Also Known as Che, “but there is no doubt that in the hours following the liberation of Santa Clara, Che signed death warrants for several of Batista’s policeman whom the people accused of being torturers and rapists … including Casillas Lumpuy.”

Quoting Che now, Taibo continues: “‘I did no more and no less than the situation demanded — i.e., the death sentence for those twelve murderers, because they had committed crimes against the people, not against us.'” They would scarcely be the last.

Meanwhile,

the crowds in Havana were exacting a long-delayed justice. A sort of reasoned and selective vandalism took hold of the crowds, who attacked the gas stations belonging to Shell, which was said to have collaborated with Batista by giving him tanks. They also destroyed the casinos belonging to the American Mafia and the Batista underworld, trashed parking meters — one of the regime’s scams — and attacked houses belonging to leading figures in the dictatorship.

* Casillas carried out the murder in a law enforcement guise: sent on some pretext to arrest Menendez, Casillas shot his man dead when Menendez flexed his parliamentary immunity and told the cop to pound sand.

** Casillas’s defense lawyer in the Menendez proceeding was Jose Miro Cardona, who briefly became Prime Minister of post-Batista Cuba but had a much longer career as a prominent anti-Castro exile. As chair of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, he was the potential head of state had the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion succeeded.

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2003: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri mock-executed at CIA black site

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Around this time — “sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003” — a CIA debriefer questioning Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a CIA “black site” in Poland mock-executed his prey.

The Saudi national had been captured in October of 2002 and vanished into the 9/11-mad empire’s dark heart of secret torture dungeons scattered across the globe.

He’d already been renditioned to Afghanistan, and then to Thailand, and then onward (for the events of this post) to a onetime Third Reich base in Poland. In Afghanistan he’d been stripped and hanged up by his shackled hands, his toes barely touching the floor. In Thailand, interrogators waterboarded him and locked him in a coffin.* Graphic videos of his treatment in Thailand, at least, once existed; they are among the evidence destroyed by the CIA in 2005 in its successful project to scotch any public accountability for its torture program.

Nashiri stands accused of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, although different intelligence officers characterize him as anything from the “mastermind” to “the dumbest terrorist I ever met.” The only judicial hearing he’s ever had on this matter occurred in abstentia in Yemen in 2004, and resulted in a death sentence. He resides today in America’s forever oubliette at Guantanamo Bay, where a supposed prosecution began in 2011 and has been formally ongoing ever since, mired like all other cases there in the place’s intrinsic juridical incoherence. It seems likely that Nashiri will spend the rest of his days at Guantanamo, his mind a wreck from his ordeals.

One such ordeal, the one qualifying him for consideration by Executed Today, was his feigned execution by handgun and then by power drill — as disclosed by the CIA Inspector General’s report; the quoted excerpt below appears as paragraphs 91 and 92, beginning on page 49 of this pdf. The incident is likewise described in a subsequent Senate Intelligence Committee report, which can be perused here (see p. 98). The name of Nashiri’s mock-executioner is among the many bracketed redactions in this text; it has been publicly reported that the man in question is former CIA and FBI linguist Albert El Gamil.

[     ] interrogation team members, whose purpose it was to interrogate Al-Nashiri and debrief Abu Zubaydah, initially staffed [     ] The interrogation team continued EITs on Al-Nashiri for two weeks in December 2002 [     ] they assessed him to be “compliant.” Subsequently, CTC officers at Headquarters [     ] sent a [     ] senior operations officer (the debrief) [     ] to debrief and assess Al-Nashiri.

[     ]The debrief assessed Al-Nashiri as withholding information, at which point [     ] reinstated [     ] hooding, and handcuffing. Sometime between 28 December 2002 and 1 January 2003, the debriefer used an unloaded semi-automatic handgun as a prop to frighten Al-Nashiri into disclosing information. After discussing this plan with [     ] the debriefer entered the cell where Al-Nashiri sat shackled and racked the handgun once or twice close to Al-Nashiri’s head. On what was probably the same day, the debriefer used a power drill to frighten Al-Nashiri. With [     ] consent, the debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded. The debriefer did not touch Al-Nashiri with the power drill.

Mock execution was not among the menu of torture techniques given legal imprimatur by the Agency, and other interrogators’ protests at his methods led to El Gamil’s removal from the case shortly thereafter.

Sanctioned or no, it is not the only mock execution known to have been inflicted by CIA torturers. Scrolling past seas of black redactions to paragraphs 169-174 of that same Inspector General’s report, we find that

The debriefer who employed the handgun and power drill on Al-Nashiri [     ] advised that those actions were predicated on a technique he had participated in [     ] The debriefer stated that when he was [     ] between September and October 2002, [     ] offered to fire a handgun outside the interrogation room while the debriefer was interviewing a detainee who was thought to be withholding information. [     ] staged the incident, which included screaming and yelling outside the cell by other CIA officers and [     ] guards. When the guards moved the detainee from the interrogation room, they passed a guard who was dressed as a hooded detainee, lying motionless on the ground, and made to appear as if he had been shot to death.

The debriefer claimed he did not think he needed to report this incident because the [     ] had openly discussed this plan [     ] several days prior to and after the incident. When the debriefer was later [     ] and believed he needed a non-traditional technique to induce the detainee to cooperate he told [     ] he wanted to wave a handgun in front of the detainee to scare him. The debriefer said he did not believe he was required to notify Headquarters of this technique, citing the earlier, unreported mock execution [     ].

A senior operations officer [     ] recounted that around September 2002 [     ] heard that the debriefer had staged a mock execution. [     ] was not present but understood it went badly; it was transparently a ruse and no benefit was derived from it. [     ] observed that there is a need to be creative as long as it is not considered torture. [     ] stated that if such a proposal were made now, it would involve a great deal of consultation. It would begin with [     ] management and would include CTC/Legal, [     ] and the CTC.

The [     ] admitted staging a “mock execution” in the first days that [     ] was open. According to the [     ] the technique was his idea but was not effective because it came across as being staged. It was based on the concept, from SERE school, of showing something that looks real, but is not. The [     ] recalled that a particular CTC interrogator later told him about employing a mock execution technique. The [     ] did not know when this incident occurred or if it was successful. He viewed this technique as ineffective because it was not believable.

Four [     ] who were interviewed admitted to either participating in one of the above-described incidents or hearing ab out them. [     ] described staging a mock execution of a detainee. Reportedly, a detainee who witnessed the “body” in the aftermath of the ruse “sang like a bird.”

[     ] revealed that approximately four days before his interview with OIG, the [     ] stated he had conducted a mock execution [     ] in October or November 2002. Reportedly, the firearm was discharged outside of the building, and it was done because the detainee reportedly possessed critical threat information. [     ] stated that he told the [     ] not to do it again. He stated that he has not heard of a similar act occurring [     ] since then.

* Gina Haspel oversaw the Thailand site at the end of 2002, and her countenancing torture against Nashiri and other detainees there made for a passing controversy when Donald Trump appointed her to direct the Agency.

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1666: James Blackwood and John M’Coul, two Covenanter martyrs

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From The Homes, Haunts, and Battlefields of the Covenanters. The martyrs in question, who were among many of that profession in these years, were executed by a condemned fellow-Covenanter who days before in Ayr had miserably consented to turn hangman in order to save his own life. We’ve previously covered that tragedy in these pages.

STOP PASSENGER
THOU TREADEST NEAR TWO MARTYRS
JAMES BLACKWOOD & JOHN M’COUL

who suffered at IRVINE
on the 31st of December 1666
REV xii. 11th

These honest Country-men whose Bones here lie
A Victim fell to Prelates Cruelty;
Condemn’d by bloody and unrighteous Laws
They died Martyrs for the good old cause
Which Balaams wicked Race in vain assail
For no Inchantments ‘gainst Israel prevail
Life and this evil World they did contemn
And dy’d for Christ who died first for them
‘They lived unknown
Till Persecution dragged them into fame
And chas’d them up to Heaven’ [Cowper lines -ed.]

Erected by Friends to Religious Liberty -31st Dec. 1823.

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A Day in the Death Penalty Around the Martyrology

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We’ve paid tribute before to Christian martyrologies’ adroit remembrances of the dead. December 30 furnishes a crowded example from the Roman Breviary, found here:

Upon the 30th day of December were born into the better life —

At Spoleto, under the Emperor Maximian, the holy martyrs Sabinus, bishop of that see; the deacons Exuperantius and Marcellus, and the President Venustian along with his wife and children. Marcellus and Exuperantius were first racked then heavily cudgelled, then mangled with hooks, and their sides were afterwards burnt until they died. Venustian and his wife and children were shortly afterward put to the sword; holy Sabinus had his hands cut off, and was long imprisoned, and at length lashed to death. These did not all suffer at the same time, but they are all commemorated upon the same day.

At Alexandria, the holy martyrs Mansuetus, Severus, Appian, Donatus, Honorius and their companions.

At Thessalonica, the holy martyr Anysia [about the year 303]. There likewise holy Anysius, bishop of that city. [He succeeded S. Ascole, and died about the year 404.]

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1987: Five in South Yemen for the Events of ’86

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From Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia concerning the juridical follow-up to the ouster of Ali Nasir Muhammad during the a civil war in South Yemen referred to as the Events of ’86. This breakdown of order in the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) would set the stage for its eventual 1990 unification with North Yemen.

There was a relentless propaganda campaign against Ali Nasir and his associates, especially Muhammad Ali Ahmad. The main leaders were put on trial in open court in the presence of television cameras and the media. For a while it was compulsive viewing, as hundreds of witnesses testified in a unique experiment. As the process dragged on, however, the leaders became increasingly uncomfortable. The desire for revenge in early 1986 had been replaced by a need by mid 1987 to heal wounds. They now wanted to persuade Ali Nasir’s followers to return to the PDRY and cooperate with the new regime. In March 1987, for example, [Haidar Abu Bakr] al-Attas said that, of the 5,000 who had been arrested in early 1986, only 200 were still being held, of whom 94 were on trial in Aden and 48 were being tried in absentia. Later in the year, a general amnesty was declared for people who returned to the PDRY by the end of the year — subsequently extended to July 1987. Throughout this period, Ali Nasir (by now living in Syria) offered negotiations, which were scorned, but also sent operatives over the border in Shabwa and Abyan to stir up trouble. There was also a steady stream of defections to his headquarters in Ta’izz, not far from the PDRY border.

The trials were concluded in December 1987, and on 27 December the Politburo ratified death sentences on Ali Nasir, Muhammad Ali Ahmad, Ahmad Musa’id Husain, Abdullah Salih Ulaywa, Ahmad Abdullah al-Hassani, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi (now president of the Republic of Yemen), Faruq Ali Ahmad, Alawi Husain Farhan (former deputy minister of state security), Hadi Ahmad Nasir (former YSP Secretary for Aden), Ahmad Husain Musa and Mubarak Salim Ahmad. It commuted sentences passed on another 24 to 15 years in prison (including Muhammad Abdullah al-Battani and Sulaiman Nasir Muhammad), and it reduced a sentence of 15 years imposed on al-Tali’a leader Anis Hassan Yahva to seven years. Others were given lengthy sentences. Five were executed on 29 December: Faruq Ali Ahmad, Hadi Ahmad Nasir, Alawi Husain Farhan, Ahmad Husain Musa (a former commander of the air force) and Mubarak Salim Ahmad (commander of Ali Nasir’s bodyguards). The executions led to outrage in the north and parts of the PDRY, as well as the wider Arab world. A shocked [Ali Salem] al-Bidh remained firm, but al-Attas and others argued that the remaining prisoners should be treated with leniency. Over the next two years, many of those in prison were released or pardoned.

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1866: John Roberson

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From the Richmond (Va.) Whig, Dec. 28, 1866 …

… and the same source on Jan. 1, 1867:

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