Reddit mentions of The Hangman's Tale: Memoirs of a Public Executioner

Hanging is an extremely efficient way to kill people. This book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hangmans-Tale-Memoirs-Public-Executioner/dp/0330316338 about the last public executioner in Britain describes haw they would rush the person to be executed into the hanging chamber and have him dead within a minute or two. They prided themselves on not giving the prisoner time to think about it.

Disgusting. My God, if you're gonna execute someone, find a way to do it quickly and cleanly.

The US should learn from the Brits. Either do hangings the way the Brits used to do them (check out the book The Hangman's Tale by Syd Dernley, a former assistant hangman in 1950s England, where he gives you all the details you need), or look at the TV show a former Conservative MP did in 2008 where he concluded that using nitrogen gas would probably be the best way.

I tell ya, I do not know what it is about you Americans. With both team sports and capital punishment, you seem determined to come up with the most complicated possibilities available, in contrast with the rest of the world, who likes to keep things simple. Think about it:

• Sports: The rest of the world has simple games where the object is to put something into a goal, like soccer and hockey. An alien visiting Earth could look at those games and quickly get the gist of them. The US has football and baseball, neither of which are at all simple, and which befuddle just about anyone outside of North America who tries to understand them.
  
  
• Executions: In the rest of the world, you have hanging, shooting, or chopping heads off. In the US, you have the gas chamber (which was a horrible way to go), lethal injections (whose problems are becoming more and more obvious), the electric chair (not much better than the gas chamber)....
  
  Anyhow. If you're going to persist in executing people even though the stats show that death penalties go way too often to certain races, and that there are many innocent people who've been convicted and sentenced to death, at least choose a method that doesn't make y'all look like fools in front of the rest of the planet.