On this date in 1892, serial arsonist Jens Nielsen was beheaded with an axe in the courtyard of Horsens prison — the last civil execution ever conducted in Denmark.
According to this Danish biography, Nielsen had incurred a long prison sentence for burning several farms in July 1883.
(He’d just returned from a fruitless stint in the New World, torching a warehouse in England on the return voyage.)
Apprehended immediately and sentenced to a long prison term, Jens confronted an age-old dilemma which was evidently noticeably acute among melancholy Danes: effecting state-assisted suicide on the scaffold.
These cases must have once been fairly frequent because Denmark, by an ordinance of December 18, 1767, deliberately abandoned the death penalty in cases where “melancholy and other dismal persons [committed murder] for the exclusive purpose of losing their lives.” The background for the provision was, in the words of Orste, “the thinking that was then current among the unenlightened that by murdering another person and thereby being sentenced to death, one might still attain salvation, whereas if one were to take one’s own life, one would be plunged into eternal damnation.”
The ordinance was ineffective in one case, at least, that of Jens Nielsen, who was born in 1862 and spent a most unhappy and unfortunate childhood. In 1884 he was sentenced to 16 years of hard labor for theft and arson. The following year he tried to kill a prison guard. He was tried, sentenced to death and received a commutation to life. He was then placed in solitary confinement. A year later he tried again to kill a guard, “realizing that he could not stand solitary confinement, did not have the nerve to commit suicide and wanted to force his execution.” He was again tried, sentenced to death and the sentence commuted. In 1892, having remained in solitary confinement all that time, he tried again to kill a guard. This time he got his wish, was sentenced to death and executed. (Source.)
He even managed to crack wise, “Thank you!” to the mayor who wished him God’s help on the way to the scaffold — envoy of the powers both temporal and ethereal that would finally loose his shackles.
Denmark’s death penalty law lingered into the 1930’s, but even the occasional death sentences were no longer carried out. Apart from a brief revival after World War II to punish war crimes committed during the Nazi occupation, nobody has been put to death in Denmark in — as of today — 116 years.
On this day..
- 1738: George Whalley and Dean Briant, wife-murderers
- 1842: The prisoner-mutineers of the Governor Phillip
- 1721: Catharaina Margaratha Linck, lesbian
- 1873: Twelve Cuban revolutionaries
- 1866: Robert Dodge, haunter
- 1944: Joseph Watson and Willie Wimberly Jr.
- 1793: Madame Roland, éminence grise
- 1752: James of the Glen
- 1676: Anna Schmieg and Barbara Schleicher, Langenburg witches
- 1861: Sushun, by Empress Dowager Cixi
- 1969: Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, assassin of Tom Mboya
- 1845: Lavinia Burnett and Crawford Burnett
- 1520: Stockholm Bloodbath