Garrote

A garrote (a Spanish word; alternative spellings include garotte and garrotte) is a handheld weapon, most often referring to a ligature of chain, rope, scarf, wire or fishing line used to strangle someone to death. The term especially refers to an execution device, but is sometimes used in assassination because it can be completely silent. In addition, the garrote is used by some military units. It is known that members of the French Foreign Legion are trained in its use. The garrote was allegedly employed by Thuggees. A garrote can be made out of many different materials, including ropes, tie wraps, fishing lines, nylon, and even guitar strings and piano wire.

Some incidents of garroting have involved a stick used to tighten the garrote; the Spanish name actually refers to that very 'rod', so it is a pars pro toto where the eponymous component may actually be absent. One of the reasons possession of a nunchaku is illegal in many jurisdictions is that it can easily be employed as a garrote in some configurations.

In British criminal law, garrotte also was a defined type of violent robbery using at least physical threat against the victims.

Use as an execution device

Execution by garrote

The garrote particularly refers to the execution device used by the Spaniards until the end of Francisco Franco's dictatorship as recently as 1974. In Spain, it was abolished, as well as the death penalty, in 1978 with the new constitution. Originally, it was an execution where the convict was killed by hitting him with a club ("garrote" in Spanish). Later, it was refined and consisted of a seat to restrain the condemned person while the executioner tightened a metal band around his neck with a crank or a wheel until suffocation of the condemned.

Some versions of this device incorporated a fixed metal blade or spike directed at the spinal cord, to hasten the breaking of the neck. Such a device can be seen in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough&From Russia with Love. The spiked version, called the Catalan garrote, was used as late as 1940, and up to 1974 in Cuba (as well as being used by some other colonies until shortly after the 1898 Spanish-American War). A further alternate device involved two metallic squares covered with leather, of which the upper one moved over the bottom one when the executioner turned the lever, breaking the condemned's neck trapped inside.

The garrote was not abolished in the Philippines after that Spanish colony was captured by the Americans in 1898. The most notable victims of the garrote in the Philippines was the trio of native priests, the Gomburza, for their alleged participation in the Cavite Mutiny.

Short history

The garotte (latin laqueus) is known to have been used in the first century BC in Rome. It is referred to in accounts of the Catiline conspiracy where conspirators including Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura were strangled with a laqueus in the Tullianum and the implement is shown in some early reliefs eg. Répertoire de Reliefs grecs et romains, tome I, p.341 (1919). See [1]. It was also used in the Middle Ages in Spain and Portugal. It was employed during the conquista of Latin America, as attested by the execution of the Inca emperor Atahualpa. In the 1810s the earliest known metallic versions of garrottes appeared, and started to be used in Spain. On 28 April 1828 they would be declared the single civilian execution method in Spain. The Portuguese Penal Code, in 1851, would include it as an execution method (substituting hanging), but it would never be used under that provision (the death penalty in times of peace was abolished in Portugal in 1867, the last execution there having taken place in 1849).

In May 1897, the last public garrotting was carried out in Spain, in Barcelona. After that, all executions would be held in private inside prisons (even if the press took photos of some of them).

The last civilian executions in Spain were those of Pilar Prades in May 1959 and José María Jarabo in July 1959. Recent legislation had made many crimes belong to military legislation (like robbery-murder); thus, for some years, prosecutors would rarely request civilian executions. Several executions would still be carried out in Spain, 8 of them in the 1970s: the January 1972 firing squad execution of robber-murderer Pedro Martínez Expósito, the March 1974 garrottings of Heinz Ches (real name Georg Michael Welzel) and Salvador Puig Antich, both accused of killing police officers (theirs were the last garrottings in Spain and in the world) and the firing squad executions of five militants from ETA and FRAP in September 1975.

With the 1973 Penal Code, prosecutors once again started requesting execution in civilian cases. If the death penalty had not been abolished in 1978 after dictator Francisco Franco's death, civilian executions would most likely have resumed. The last man to be sentenced to death by garrotting was José Luis Cerveto in October 1977, for a double robbery-murder in May 1974 (he was also a pedophile). He requested that the democratic government execute him, but his sentence was commuted. Another prisoner whose civilian death sentence was commuted by the new government was businessman Juan Ballot, for the hired murder of his wife in Navarra in November 1973. The writer Camilo José Cela requested from the Consejo General del Poder Judicial the garrote that was kept in storage and had been used for Puig Antich. It was displayed for a time in the room [2][3] that the Cela Foundation devoted to his novel La familia de Pascual Duarte, until Puig Antich's family asked for its removal

Andorra, in 1990, would become the last country in the world to abolish the death penalty by garrotting, though this method had been unused there since the late 19th century, and the only execution in Andorra in the 20th century, that of Antoni Arenis for double fratricide in 1943, was carried out by firing squad because of the unavailability of a garrotte executioner at that moment.

The garotte was sometimes used in England to execute religious heretics before they were burned at the stake.

See also

• Piano wire