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In 1832, two convicted murders were publicly hanged in England. After the hanging the bodies were placed inside iron cages specially fitted to their forms, and placed on gibbets, posts with arms extending from the top from which the iron cages were suspended. The bodies were left to rot in full public view as a warning to other would-be malefactors. These were the last two such executions carried out in England, for "hanging in irons" was considered too ghastly a form a punishment even in those coarse days.

But this form of punishment had already been civilized considerably over the way it had been practiced in medieval England. As originally practiced, "hanging in irons" was done to a live body without the compassionate benefit of a prior neck-hanging.

After a criminal had been convicted and sentenced to death he was delivered in manacles to a blacksmith who proceeded to measure the condemned man's body and to beat the fitted iron bands into a form-fitting cage. It is said that even the most callous and unemotional criminals would break into sobs as they were being fitted for irons. Often they would beg to be killed immediately rather than be subjected to the ordeal that was about to commence.

Having been secured within the iron cage the criminal was taken to a public place and suspended from the arm of the gibbet. Then, they were simply left alone without food or water, to die from dehydration and thirst.

The dreadful spectacle of seeing and hearing a live man die slowly over several days from being deprived of water and food was certainly jarring and discomforting. Indeed it was so much so, that the law was changed to require a quick and merciful death by neck-hanging prior to placing the body in irons.

"Hanging in irons" was one of the manners of death that the founding fathers had in mind when they amended the Constitution to prohibit "cruel and unusual punishment." Today, the most vile and unrepentant serial sociopathic murderer on death row is assured of never having to face such a hideous, cruel, and painful end.

It is the this form of "painless, compassionate" death by starvation and dehydration that Judge Greer, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and United States Supreme Court has condemned an innocent woman, Terri Schiavo, to suffer during this Easter season.