Half-hanging

Half-hanging is a method of torture, usually inflicted to force information from the victim, in which a rope is pulled tightly around the victim’s neck and then slackened when the victim becomes unconscious. The victim is revived and the process repeated.

Half-hanging of United Irishmen by government forces in 1798.

During the Irish Rebellion of 1798 against British rule in Ireland, government forces,^[1] in particular the militia^[2] and yeomanry, frequently used half-hanging against suspected rebels. A prominent victim of half-hanging was Anne Devlin, the housekeeper of Robert Emmet.^[3][4]

Half-hanging was also used against slaves in the United States, for example in Richmond, Virginia. In his 1849 narrative, Henry Box Brown recounts how, in the aftermath of Nat Turner's Rebellion, many slaves "found away from their quarters after dark...were suspended to some limb of a tree, with a rope about their necks, so adjusted as not to quite strangle them, and then they were pelted by the men and boys with rotten eggs."^[5]

See also

• Hanging
• Waterboarding
• John Smith (housebreaker), who earned the nickname Half-hanged Smith after surviving a sentence of hanging^[6]