The garrote is a device that strangles a person to death (as in the photograph below). It can also be used to break a person’s neck

The garrote is a device that strangles a person to death (as in the photograph below). It can also be used to break a person’s neck.

The device was used in Spain until it was outlawed in 1978 with the abolition of the death penalty. It normally consisted of a seat in which the prisoner was restrained while the executioner tightened a metal band around his neck until he died.

 Some versions of the garrote incorporated a metal bolt which pressed in to the spinal chord, breaking the neck.

This spiked version is known as the Catalan garrote. The last execution by garrote was José Luis Cerveto in October 1977. Andorra was the last country in the world to outlaw its use, doing so in 1990.

the March 1974 garrotings of Heinz Ches (real name Georg Michael Welzel) and Salvador Puig Antich, both accused of killing police officers (theirs were the last state-sanctioned garrotings in Spain and in the world); and the firing-squad executions of five militants from ETA and FRAP in September 1975.

With the 1973 Penal Code, prosecutors once again started requesting execution in civilian cases. If the death penalty had not been abolished in 1978 after dictator Francisco Franco’s death, civilian executions would most likely have resumed. The last man to be sentenced to death by garroting was José Luis Cerveto el asesino de Pedralbes in October 1977, for a double robbery-murder in May 1974 (he was also a paedophile).[citation needed] He requested that the democratic government execute him, but his sentence was commuted. Another prisoner whose civilian death sentence was commuted by the new government was businessman Juan Ballot, for the murder by hire of his wife in Navarre in November 1973.

The writer Camilo José Cela requested from the Consejo General del Poder Judicial a garrote to display in his foundation. It was kept in storage in Barcelona and probably had been used for Puig Antich.

It was displayed for a time in the room that the Cela Foundation devoted to his novel La familia de Pascual Duarte until Puig Antich’s family asked for its removal.

Andorra, in 1990, was the last country to abolish the death penalty by garroting, though this method had been unused there since the late 19th century, and the only execution in Andorra in the 20th century, that of Antoni Arenis for fratricide in 1943, was carried out by firing squad because of the unavailability of a garrote executioner at that moment.