WHAT happens when someone hangs themself, and how quickly do they die? The results of this grisly area of research could be significant in court cases where prison officers are accused of negligence or foul play.
Judicial hangings are designed to snap the condemned person鈥檚 neck, severing the spinal cord and causing immediate death. Suicide by hanging usually follows a different course: the victim dies of asphyxia 鈥� a lack of oxygen to the brain.
Exactly what it is that stops oxygen reaching the brain and how long it takes to die have been the . Three main mechanisms have been proposed: compression of the airways, obstruction of the blood vessels to the brain, or pressure on the vagus nerve that triggers an abnormal heart rate and so leads to cardiac arrest.
Advertisement
Now a study of videos left behind by people who recorded their own hangings points to obstruction of the blood vessels being to blame.
Anny Sauvageau, a forensic pathologist at Alberta鈥檚 in Edmonton, Canada, and colleagues analysed videos of eight hangings: two were suicides and six were accidents in which the victim was seeking an auto-erotic experience. This showed that the victims lose consciousness in as little as 8 seconds, and then perform a complex sequence of involuntary movements and seizures, before eventually becoming limp.
Despite constriction of the neck, they continued to make breathing sounds, supporting the idea that obstruction of blood vessels was the dominant effect. The quickest death in the study was estimated to have occurred after 62 seconds, and the slowest after 7 minutes 31 seconds ().
The injuries the dying victims were seen to sustain as their limbs hit walls during seizures caught the attention of co-author Vernon Geberth of , a consultancy in New York. 鈥淚njuries that might have been thought to have occurred before the suicide could actually be a result of these seizures,鈥� he says.
鈥淚njuries of the dying victims could be relevant in court cases involving mistreatment in prisons鈥�
The new information could have a bearing on cases in which police or prison officers are accused of negligence in their treatment and surveillance of prisoners at risk of suicide.
鈥淭his raises the possibility that people could commit suicide between a reasonable schedule of checks,鈥� says Stuart Hamilton, a pathologist at Sunderland Royal Hospital, in the UK. 鈥淚t鈥檚 certainly something that will assist in cases of negligence in prisons.鈥�
