The ''Official Table of Drops'', formerly issued by the British

Home Office The Home Office (HO), also known (especially in official papers and when referred to in Parliament) as the Home Department, is the United Kingdom's interior ministry. It is responsible for public safety and policing, border security, immigr ...

, is a manual which is used to calculate the appropriate length of rope for long drop

hanging Hanging is killing a person by suspending them from the neck with a noose or ligature strangulation, ligature. Hanging has been a standard method of capital punishment since the Middle Ages, and has been the primary execution method in numerou ...

s. Following a series of failed hangings, including those of John Babbacombe Lee, a committee chaired by Henry Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare was formed in 1886 to discover and report on the most effective manner of hanging. The committee's report was printed in 1888 and recommended a drop energy of . In April 1892, the Home Office revised this based on an energy of . In practice, however, the hangmen ignored this table and used considerably longer drops. A significantly revised edition of the Table of Drops was published in October 1913, allowing of drop energy – and then from 1939 executioners routinely added nine more inches () to the drop in the 1913 Table. The Table continued to be used in the United Kingdom until the country suspended capital punishment in 1965, and the UK abolished the death penalty altogether in 1998. The Table remains in use in former British colonies that have retained capital punishment by hanging, such as

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

Other published drop tables

* 1947 US "Procedure for Military Executions" handbook.

References

External links

The Aberdare CommitteeReport of the Aberdare Committee
Capital punishment in the United Kingdom Execution equipment Hanging {{capital punishment