In this 15th-century depiction of the burning of Albigensians after an auto da fé, the condemned had been garroted previously. It is one of the first depictions of a garrote. Pedro Berruguete, Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fé.
The man who assassinated Charlie Kirk, and apparently confessed, has been charged with murder. There is talk about the death penalty.
Having been threatened with murder, I am against assassination, especially if you have been charged with saying, or writing things that merit a punishment, such as garroting, and burning at the stake. After one confessed their sins, after being tortured by the Church, you are offered being garroted – then burned at the stake! This was consider – being merciful. There was a Spanish and English Inquisition. In both nations you were asked if you are
- A Catholic
- A Protestant
On;y Jews were asked if hey are a Christian. If you said
“Jesus is my Lord!” things went better for you.
Charley was coming to speak at the University of Oregon. His follower said this was kept a secret. If Charlie was alive, I would ask him
“Why did you keep your appearance here a secret?”
The second question is…
Top Christian leaders during the Inquisition believed spilling the blood of those they tortured was a sin – if it led to their death. This is why those guilty of heresy – were burned. However, if you repent, and recant your Christian Religion – you will be garroted before being burned. If you had a chance to be a Defender of the Faith, would you rule a simple beheading is allowed, and will not break the Sixth Commandment?
John Presco
EUGENE, Ore. — At least 1,000 people gathered at Alton Baker Park on Saturday night to honor the life of political activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated.
Kirk, 31, leaves behind a wife and two children.
The event included a march to Hayward Field, and students from local Turning Point chapters expressed that they see this as not just a moment to mourn, but as a turning point in the national conversation about political violence, tolerance and open debate.
“Thou shalt not kill” is the sixth commandment in the Bible, found in Exodus 20:13, and it is a prohibition against the unlawful taking of human life. While some translations, like the King James Version, use the word “kill,” many modern versions and interpretations, especially in Judaism and some Christian traditions, understand the original Hebrew word (ratsach) to mean “murder”. This distinction is important because it allows for exceptions like killing in self-defense, war, or capital punishment, which were permitted under certain circumstances in the Old Testament, while condemning premeditated, unlawful killing. Jesus expanded on this commandment in the New Testament, teaching that anger and hatred can be forms of murder, thereby emphasizing inner purity and reconciliation.
It also praises Kirk as someone whose “steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty,” something that could generate some Democratic grumbling. The resolution follows a Monday vigil organized by Republican leaders in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall.
“We have so many bad philosophies, ideologies, politics … his was basically just good. He talked about family … go ‘get married’ … it sounds old fashioned when you think about it, but he’s right.” President Donald Trump paid tribute Friday to Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, who was assassinated at an event at Utah Valley University last Wednesday.
A garrote (/ɡəˈrɒt, ɡəˈroʊt/ gə-RO(H)T; alternatively spelled as garotte and similar variants)[1] or garrote vil (Spanish: [ɡaˈrote ˈβil]) is a weapon and a method of capital punishment. It consists of a handheld (or, in later years, sometimes mechanical) ligature of chain, rope, scarf, wire, or fishing line, used to strangle a person.[2]
Assassination weapon
A garrote can be made of different materials, including ropes, cloth, cable ties, fishing lines, nylon, guitar strings, telephone cord or piano wire.[2][3][4] A stick may be used to tighten the garrote; the Spanish word refers to the stick itself.[5] In Spanish, the term may also refer to a rope and stick used to constrict a limb as a torture device.[2][6]
Since World War II, the garrote has been regularly employed as a weapon by soldiers as a silent means of killing sentries and other enemy personnel.[3][4] Instruction in the use of purpose-built and improvised garrottes is included in the training of many elite military units and special forces.[4] A typical military garrote consists of two wooden handles attached to a length of flexible wire; the wire is looped over a sentry’s head and pulled taut in one motion.[3][4] Soldiers of the French Foreign Legion have used a particular type of double-loop garrote (referred to as la loupe), where a double coil of rope or cord is dropped around a victim’s neck and then pulled taut. Even if the victim pulls on one of the coils, the other is tightened.[4]
Garrote-like assassination techniques were widely employed in 17th- and 18th-century India, particularly by the alleged Thuggee cult.[2] Practitioners used a yellow silk or cloth scarf called a rumāl.[2] The Indian version of the garrote frequently incorporates a knot at the center intended to aid in crushing the larynx, decreasing the communication capabilities of the victim, while someone applies pressure to the victim’s back, usually using a foot or knee.
Execution device
The garrote (Latin: laqueus) is known to have been used in the first century BC in Rome. It is referred to in accounts of the Second Catilinian 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, e.g., Répertoire de Reliefs grecs et romains, tome I, p. 341 (1919).[7] It was also used in the Middle Ages in Spain and Portugal. It was employed during the conquista of the Americas, notably in the execution of the Inca emperor Atahualpa.
It was intended as a more merciful form of execution than death by burning, where heretics who converted to Christianity after their conviction would receive a quick strangulation from the Spanish Inquisition. A later version of the garrote used an iron collar with a large metal screw in the back. The theory was that when the screw was tightened, it would crush the brain stem and kill the victim instantly. But if the screw missed the point where the brain meets the spinal column, it would simply bore into their neck while the iron collar strangled them.[8]
In the Ottoman Empire, execution by strangulation was reserved for very high officials and members of the ruling family. Unlike the Spanish version, a bowstring was used instead of a tightening collar.[9]
During the Peninsular War of 1808–1814, French forces regularly used the garrote to execute Spanish guerrilleros, priests, and other opponents of Napoleonic rule. Around 1810 the earliest known metallic garrote appeared in Spain, and on 28 April 1828, the garrote was declared the sole method of executing civilians in that country. In May 1897, the last public garroting in Spain was performed in Barcelona. After that, all executions were performed inside prisons.
Abolition
The last civilian executions in Spain, both by garroting, were those of the poisoner Pilar Prades in May 1959 and the spree killer José María Jarabo in July 1959. Recent legislation had caused many crimes (such as robbery–murder) to fall under the jurisdiction of military law; thus, prosecutors rarely requested civilian executions. Military executions were still performed in Spain until the 1970s. The garrotings of Heinz Chez (real name Georg Michael Welzel) and Salvador Puig Antich in March 1974, both convicted in the Francoist State of killing police officers, were the last state-sanctioned garrotings in Spain and in the world.
With the 1973 Penal Code, prosecutors once again started requesting execution in civilian cases, but the death penalty was abolished in 1978 after dictator Francisco Franco‘s death. The last man to be sentenced to death by garroting was José Luis Cerveto “el asesino de Pedralbes” in October 1977, for a double robbery–murder in May 1974. Cerveto requested execution, but his sentence was commuted. Another prisoner whose civilian death sentence was commuted was businessman Juan Ballot, for the contract killing of his wife in Navarre in November 1973.
After the death penalty was abolished in Spain, the writer Camilo José Cela obtained a garrote (which had probably been used for the execution of Puig Antich) from the Consejo General del Poder Judicial to display at his foundation. The device was kept in storage in Barcelona, and was displayed in the room[10][11] that the Cela Foundation devoted to his novel La familia de Pascual Duarte until Puig Antich’s family asked for its removal.[12]
In 1990, Andorra became the last country to officially abolish the death penalty by garrotting, though this method had not been employed there since the late 12th century.
Notable deaths by garroting
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| Name | Year |
|---|---|
| Publius Cornelius Lentulus Sura | 63 BC |
| Vercingetorix | 46 BC |
| Atahualpa | 1533 |
| Diego de Almagro | 1538 |
| Şehzade Bayezid | 1561 |
| Agnes Sampson | 1591 |
| Luis de Carvajal the Younger | 1596 |
| Kara Mustafa Pasha | 1683 |
| António José da Silva | 1739 |
| Tomasa Tito Condemayta | 1781 |
| Leonardo Bravo | 1812 |
| Francisco Javier de Elío | 1822 |
| Mariana de Pineda Muñoz | 1831 |
| Luis Candelas [es] | 1837 |
| Narciso López | 1851 |
| Martín Merino y Gómez [es] | 1852 |
| José Apolonio Burgos | 1872 |
| Mariano Gomez | 1872 |
| Jacinto Zamora | 1872 |
| Francisco Otero González [es] | 1880 |
| Juan Díaz de Garayo | 1881 |
| Michele Angiolillo | 1897 |
| Francisco de Dios Piqueras | 1924 |
| Honorio Sánchez Molina | 1924 |
| José María Sánchez Navarrete | 1924 |
| Agapito García Atadell [es] | 1937 |
| Benigno Andrade | 1952 |
| Lorenzo Castro [es] | 1956 |
| Juan Vázquez Pérez [es] | 1956 |
| Julio López Guixot [es] | 1958 |
| Pilar Prades | 1959 |
| Juan García Suárez [es] | 1959 |
| José María Jarabo | 1959 |
| Heinz Chez [es] | 1974 |
| Salvador Puig Antich | 1974 |
Protestants were executed in England under heresy laws during the reigns of Henry VIII (1509–1547) and Mary I (1553–1558), and in smaller numbers during the reigns of Edward VI (1547–1553), Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and James I (1603–1625). Most were executed in the short reign of Mary I in what is called the Marian persecutions. Protestant theologian and activist John Foxe described “the great persecutions & horrible troubles, the suffering of martyrs, and other such thinges” in his contemporaneously-published Book of Martyrs.
References
Blood purity statutes
During the Spanish Inquisition, limpieza de sangre, or blood purity statutes proliferated against Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity, introducing racially based discrimination and antisemitism. The first statute of purity of blood was enacted in Toledo in 1449 following anti-converso riots and killings.[81] This text stated that all Conversos or individuals whose parents or grandparents had converted to Christianity may not hold public or private office and cannot testify in a court of law. In 1496, Pope Alexander VI approved a purity statute for the Hieronymites.[81] Religious and military orders, guilds and other organizations incorporated in their by-laws clauses demanding proof of “cleanliness of blood”. Converso families had to either contend with discrimination, or bribe officials and falsify documents attesting to generations of Christian ancestry.[82]
By 1530, tribunals of the Inquisition were urged to make registers of genealogies for each town. Every married man had to submit their `genealogies, which registered them and their family as Old Christian or Converso, i.e. as “pure” or “impure”. Investigations and trials would begin if one could not submit proof of a pure bloodline or there was suspicion that the individual was lying. By the sixteenth century, blood purity statutes coalesced to become a systematic effort to exclude conversos from offices in Church and state. These statutes were closely related to the Spanish Inquisition. Together they formed a system that bred fear and encouraged hostile witnesses and even perjury, a system under which the discovery of an ancestor with Jewish blood could result in a person’s entire familial line losing everything. The practice set the foundations of race-based antisemitism.[83]
Blood purity statutes posed a significant barrier for many Spaniards to emigrate to the Americas, since some form of proof of not having recent Muslim or Jewish ancestors was required to emigrate to the Spanish Empire. In 1593 the Jesuits adopted the Decree de genere, which proclaimed that either Jewish or Muslim ancestry, no matter how distant, was an insurmountable impediment for admission to the Society of Jesus – effectively applying the Spanish principle of blood purity to Jesuits Europe-wide and world-wide.[84] Tests of blood purity began to wane only by 18th century. However, laws requiring blood purity were sometimes maintained even into the 19th century and were still present into the 20th century in some places such as Majorca, where no Xueta (descendants of the Majorcan Jewish conversos) priests were allowed to say Mass in a cathedral until the 1960s.[85][page needed]
Christian heretics
Protestantism
Despite popular myths about the Spanish Inquisition relating to Protestants, it dealt with very few cases involving actual Protestants, as there were so few in Spain.[86] Lutheran was an accusation used by the Inquisition to act against all those who acted in a way that was offensive to the church. The first of the trials against those labeled by the Inquisition as “Lutheran” were those against the sect of mystics known as the “Alumbrados” of Guadalajara and Valladolid. These trials were long and ended with prison sentences of differing lengths, though no person in the sect faced execution. The subject of the “Alumbrados” put the Inquisition on the trail of many intellectuals and clerics who, interested in Erasmian ideas, had strayed from orthodoxy. Both Charles I and Philip II were confessed admirers of Erasmus.[87][88]
The first trials against Lutheran groups, as such, took place between 1558 and 1562, at the beginning of the reign of Philip II, against two communities of Protestants from the cities of Valladolid and Seville, numbering about 120.[89] The trials signaled a notable intensification of the Inquisition’s activities. A number of autos de fe were held, some of them presided over by members of the royal family, and around 100 executions took place.[90] The autos de fe of the mid-century virtually put an end to Spanish Protestantism, which was, throughout, a small phenomenon to begin with.[91]
After 1562, though the trials continued, the repression was much reduced. In the last decades of the 16th century, approximately 200 Spaniards were accused of being Protestant.
Most of them were in no sense Protestants … Irreligious sentiments, drunken mockery, anticlerical expressions, were all captiously classified by the inquisitors (or by those who denounced the cases) as “Lutheran.” Disrespect to church images, and eating meat on forbidden days, were taken as signs of heresy…[92]
It is estimated that a dozen Protestant Spaniards were burned alive at the stake in the later part of the sixteenth century.[93]
Protestantism was treated as a marker to identify agents of foreign powers and symptoms of political disloyalty as much as, if not more than, a cause of prosecution in itself.[94]
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