Ethan Trex
Eye for an Eye: The Punishments of 8 Political Assassins
by Ethan Trex - December 9, 2011 - 10:24 PM

© Brendan Smialowski/Reuters/Corbis

John Hinckley is in the news this week as a judge considers whether the man who shot President Reagan should be able to live as an outpatient. Here’s a look at the fates of various people who were more successful at taking down world leaders.

1. Balthasar Gerard

Gerard, a Catholic Frenchman, assassinated William I of Orange, the leader of the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule in 1584. Gerard’s attempts to flee the scene didn’t work, and the authorities gruesomely tortured him for days. Gerard’s captors hung heavy stones from his toes, crushed his feet, and branded and broiled his skin.

As unpleasant as that sounds, it was just the prelude to Gerard’s actual sentence that had been prescribed by the local magistrates. His right hand was burned off with a red-hot iron before he was disemboweled alive and had his heart removed and thrown in his face. This sentence might be the definition of “overkill.”

2. Francois Ravaillac

Raivallac fatally stabbed King Henry IV of France in 1610, allegedly because he had received a vision instructing him to help convert the whole country to Catholicism. He was saved from lynching immediately after the assassination, but in retrospect Ravaillac probably should have taken his chances with the mob rather than face his cruel official punishment. After having molten metals and boiling oil poured on his body, his four limbs were chained to four horses, which were driven in opposite directions until he was ripped apart.

3. Charles Guiteau

cgIt takes a special kind of nut to become an assassin, but Charles Guiteau, the failed civil servant who shot James Garfield, was crazy by even these lofty standards. He maintained that “the doctors killed Garfield; I just shot him,” and planned to run for the presidency when he was released from jail.

Unfortunately for Guiteau, the legal system didn’t share his opinion on the real culprit in Garfield’s death. He was hanged in June 1882 after reading some truly bizarre last words. If you want to get a look at Guiteau, though, you still can. A piece of his brain is on display at Philadelphia’s amazing Mutter Museum. If you don’t want to make a special trip to see a piece of just one presidential assassin, they’ve also got a preserved growth removed from John Wilkes Booth.

4. John Wilkes Booth

Speaking of Booth, he didn’t fare too well, either. Although he managed to escape from Ford’s Theater and spent 12 days on the lam, the authorities eventually caught up to Booth as he hid out in a Virginia tobacco barn. The soldiers torched the barn and then shot Booth through the spine.

Booth didn’t rest in much peace. His body was first buried in a storage room at a penitentiary before being moved to a warehouse. In 1869 his corpse was exhumed again and moved to the Booth family plot at a Baltimore cemetery.

Since Booth’s death, theories have swirled that maybe the soldiers shot the wrong man as the real assassin got away, and every so often historians attempt to exhume the body yet again to verify the corpse’s identity.

5. Leon Czolgosz

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Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated William McKinley in 1901, rode a quick trial and conviction straight to the electric chair at New York’s Auburn State Prison just 45 days after firing the fatal shot. After Czolgosz took his jolts of electricity, authorities doused his body with sulfuric acid to disintegrate the remains.

6. Gavrilo Princip

The Yugoslav nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, helped kick off World War I, was too young to be hanged for his crimes. Princip twice attempted suicide in prison, but neither worked. (His cyanide was too weak to fatally poison him, and he couldn’t get a shot off when he attempted to shoot himself.)

Just because the authorities couldn’t kill Princip meant they treated him well, though. He was held in a squalid prison in what is now the Czech Republic and died of tuberculosis in 1918. He weighed less than 90 pounds when he died.

7. Yigal Amir

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Amir, the assassin responsible for the 1995 murder of Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin, received a life sentence plus 14 years for his crimes. After spending several years in solitary confinement, Amir married old acquaintance Larissa Trembovler and has since fathered a son thanks to conjugal visits.

8. Oliver Cromwell

You’ve got to hand it to the English monarchy; they’re as inventive as they are grisly when it comes to punishing regicide. After the restoration of the monarchy to power in 1660, the royal family wanted to punish Cromwell for his part in the execution of King Charles I. There was a slight hitch, though; at that point Cromwell had been dead for two years.

A little thing like already being dead wasn’t going to spare Cromwell from an execution, though. Authorities exhumed his body and hanged it in a posthumous execution in 1661. (Two of his co-conspirators got the same treatment.) After the hanging, Cromwell’s body was chucked into a pit, but his severed head remained on public display on a pole for another 24 years. After that, the head changed hands several times over the course of the next three centuries before finally being buried in 1960.

This article originally appeared in 2009.

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Comments (22)

  1. Guiteau’s skeleton is at the National Museuam of Medical History in Washington D.C. It is not open to the public though, and even if you e-mail three weeks in advance of your trip and claim to be a historian they will not show it to you.

    I know that because… a, uh… FRIEND told me! Yeah, that’s it.

    posted by Witty Nickname on 8-7-2009 at 2:00 pm

  2. Dont forget the swedish hero/presidental killer Christer Pettersson

    posted by Stump on 8-7-2009 at 3:06 pm

  3. As time progresses, punishments become more humane. In the 17th century people were willing to dig up corpses to execute them. 450 years later, a guy not only gets to keep his life, but also get married. Thank goodness for progress!

    posted by Tamahome Jenkins on 8-7-2009 at 3:20 pm

  4. @Tamahome

    That’s because we are lame – people didn’t f- around back then either. Prohibition of the death penalty has been proven to be a dismal failure of our “humane” society.

    posted by roi_ratt on 8-7-2009 at 8:47 pm

  5. “Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil” (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

    posted by B-Doc on 8-8-2009 at 3:55 am

  6. the downside to swift and gruesome punishments is a lot of innocent people suffer them instead of the guilty.

    posted by emmiline on 8-10-2009 at 1:52 am

  7. Booth’s grave is in Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore. It is unmarked due to vandalism problems, though it’s in the Booth plot, so it’s easy enough to figure out which one it is. There’s a photo linked in my name.

    posted by buschap on 8-11-2009 at 3:47 pm

  8. How is what happened to Yigal Amir considered an eye for an eye? Other than being locked up the guy seems to being doing unfairly well considering he completely destroyed any hope of peace in the middle east

    posted by Krystle on 8-15-2009 at 11:55 pm

  9. You can’t really call Cromwell an assassin. The execution of Charles I was essentially an act of state.

    posted by Wilson on 10-15-2009 at 8:27 pm

  10. Just went to the Mutter Museum a couple days ago, and the Ballad of Guiteau from the musical Assassins has been stuck in my head ever since.

    posted by Katarina Navane on 3-26-2011 at 11:26 am

  11. Bizarrely enough, Guiteau may not have been wrong. It is possible Garfield would have survived the assassination if not for the actions of his doctors. When attempting to remove a bullet, doctors inserted unwashed fingers into the bullet track introducing a possible source of the infection which would later contribute to his death.

    posted by hares on 3-26-2011 at 8:45 pm

  12. I have to agree with hares (and Guiteau). If Garfield had received better medical treatment he probably would have survived. Sarah Vowell’s Assasination Vacation is a great read for anybody looking.

    posted by Brit on 3-26-2011 at 11:36 pm

  13. @Krystle:

    *snrk* Yeah, killing Yitzhak Rabin was obviously the root cause for the complete and utter failure of the “peace” process he initiated. After all, Hamas and all the other terror organizations don’t even exist, right?

    posted by MetFanMac on 3-27-2011 at 3:30 am

  14. Contrary to popular opinion, the Israeli’s are wimps when it comes to punishing murderers. Yigal Amir and many Arab Terrorists and their leaders some who killed 50 or more people, if captured alive, all sit in jail. Although I can’t deny many were not captured alive. Israel only used capital punishment twice. On Adolph Eichmann, and a treasonous soldier in 1948.

    Unfortunately very few Jews (innocent or not) captured by the other side survive. A number of innocents died very horrible deaths, not unlike Ravaillac and Gerard. If you have the stomach for it google Vadim Novesche. Unfortunately there are many dark parts of the world where there is still support for this unbelievable cruelty.

    posted by sysmg on 3-27-2011 at 3:37 pm

  15. hate to be “that reader”, but i think there is a typo.

    Just because the authorities couldn’t kill Princip meant they treated him well, though.

    i think there should be a “didn’t” after Princip.

    LOVE this article tho! very interesting reading!

    posted by megaroo on 3-28-2011 at 11:09 am

  16. @Katarina I’m glad I’m not the only one who was humming that while reading this!

    posted by Angela on 12-9-2011 at 1:34 pm

  17. I read on Cracked that Cromwell’s skulls is buried on the campus of Cambridge University, but only two people at a time are allowed to know where it is, lest the Royalists decide to dig it up to punish it even more.

    The entry on Cromwell is #5 of this list:
    http://www.cracked.com/article/147_7-secrets-only-two-living-people-know-for-some-reason/

    posted by Jina on 12-9-2011 at 2:52 pm

  18. This is the second time this week that you guys have reposted something without mentioning it was a repost. I was going to comment and then I saw that I already had! I thought I was losing my mind for a moment. Or maybe here is another Brit who thinks exactly like me! *Twilight Zone theme playing in the background*

    posted by Brit on 12-9-2011 at 4:04 pm

  19. Considering that the comments in all the threads are dated — and the first comment in this thread is dated August 2009 — you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what is a rerun and what isn’t.

    -”BB”-

    posted by Bicycle Bill on 12-10-2011 at 2:41 am

  20. This is at the bottom:

    “This article originally appeared in 2009.”

    posted by Jason English on 12-10-2011 at 7:02 am

  21. How come we all remember who killed Lincoln and Kennedy but virtually no one remembers who killed the other presidents?

    posted by amanda on 12-10-2011 at 4:11 pm

  22. Yeah, because I always look at the dates of the comments. Also, in the past when they have rerun an article they put a blurb at the beginning along with a short explanation of why they are rerunning it. Usually something to do with a current event. It was just weird for me because I didn’t remember reading it in 2009 and was going t leave a comment similar to the one I already left. That is when I noticed the date. It amused me hence the second comment
    It was by no means a complaint.

    posted by Brit on 12-11-2011 at 1:08 am

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