If someone escaped execution, people thought, perhaps God did not mean them to die.
In 1234 King Henry III of England was informed that one Walter of Pyonne, hanged for murder, had been found alive by those who had come to bury him. Learning of this, the king decreed that divine clemency must have allowed the man to survive his hanging, ordered his release, and cleared him from further prosecution for the crime.
In 1394, in France, a woman named Perrenelle Horrie was sentenced to death by drowning for having killed her infant daughter. But although she was bound and thrown into the Charente River, the woman did not die. Her bonds loosened and she floated to safety. Many who witnessed this attempted execution declared it a miracle, and she was returned to prison while the authorities deliberated their next steps.
The attempt to execute Smith took place after the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 vote, rejected Smith’s lawyers’ last-minute plea that their client not suffer through such an ordeal, given the state’s recent record of difficulty in successfully carrying out executions by lethal injection. GOP Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, in a statement
, ordered a pause on executions in the state and a review of procedures, somehow managing to place the blame for these incidents not on the prison staff but on mysterious “legal tactics and criminals hijacking the system.”And so, our minds have turned to the history of botched executions, and how people have responded to them in the past. Our two medieval examples, from England and from France, might at first seem as if they must have been exceptional.
Escape from prison, if not necessarily surviving a hanging, did not take a miracle at all. Medieval prisons were not always so confining. Often enough, the warden, or wardeness, could be overpowered in a jailbreak, or doors and walls broken open, without any need for saintly intervention to pry open bars or break chains.
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