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I read in a biography that if someone was sentenced to death penalty and the execution squad misses when firing at him, he will be released as a free man. Is it true that there ever was such a law or was it ever practiced?

curiousdannii
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Niklas Rosencrantz
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The poem "Half-Hanged Mary" (1995) by Margret Atwood purports to recount the application of such a law in the 1680s to Mary Reeve Webster of Hadley, Massachusetts, who is one of Atwood's ancestors.

Cotton Mather (the son of the then President of Harvard University and a strong advocate of the Salem witch trials) recounted this case more or less contemporaneously, and there is no good reason to doubt the veracity of this part of his account.

ohwilleke
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I can find no reference to a law. Quite a few to occasions where a death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment or transportation, even to release at the discretion of the court, not as a legal right. One or two where the convict was returned for a later attempt at execution, presumably successful.

So, nice idea, but almost certainly not true.

Laurence
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