but your honor, it's a technical deficiency

In the days before our society became "enlightened" enough to embrace the lethal injection method of capital punishment, the town of Clayton, New Mexico enjoyed a good hanging now and then. They probably liked to eat jalapenos, too.

Anyway, today an attorney related a story during lunch that was really gross, so I thought I'd share it:

A gentleman there had been sentenced to death for murdering some poor sap. His lawyer appealed the conviction and got a stay from the governor just before the offender was to be led to the gallows. During the intervening years between the filing of his appeal and the appellate court's eventual affirmation of the conviction, the murderer gained quite a bit of weight.

Unfortunately, the hangman didn't take this into account when he set up the gallows. Instead, he just used his previous calculations. You can pretty much guess at what happened next. The condemned's head was, uh, separated from his body when the hangman dropped the plank.

After this story was related, over a meal of delicious roast beast as a matter of fact, a few people piped up and opined that maybe that wasn't such a bad way to go, pain-wise.

I wonder whether his lawyer appealed on the basis of cruel and unusual punishment.