There is no single last public execution in the world, because the practice has not fully ended. A small group of countries — most prominently Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan — still carry out executions in front of crowds. Most other nations abandoned the practice over the past two centuries, usually after a single gruesome event triggered press outrage and legislation moving executions behind prison walls. The United States held its last public execution in 1936, France in 1939, and England as far back as 1868.
Countries That Still Hold Public Executions
The reason no definitive “last” exists is that several governments continue the practice today. The geographic footprint has narrowed sharply, but it has not disappeared.
Iran
Iran is among the world’s most prolific executioners and one of the few countries that still puts people to death in public view. The Iranian Penal Code allows capital punishment for offenses including drug trafficking, murder, and certain crimes classified under religious law.1European Union Agency for Asylum. Article 15(a) QD/QR – Death Penalty or Execution Monitoring organizations recorded at least 972 executions in Iran in 2024, four of them carried out in public spaces. The signature method is suspension from a mobile construction crane, which hoists the condemned person high enough for thousands of onlookers to see. Death comes by slow strangulation rather than the quick neck break of a long-drop hanging.
North Korea
North Korea uses public firing squads as a tool of political control. Researchers have identified more than 300 sites across the country where public executions have taken place, including fields, markets, riverbanks, and sports grounds. Offenses that trigger execution range from murder to watching foreign television to smuggling cattle. Local authorities routinely compel residents to attend. In one documented 2023 case, factories, farms, and marketplaces in the city of Hyesan were shut down and every person between 17 and 60 who could walk was ordered to the local airport, where a crowd of 25,000 watched nine people die by firing squad.
Afghanistan
The Taliban resumed public executions after seizing control of Afghanistan in August 2021. As of April 2025, at least ten men had been publicly executed under the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic law, which includes qisas, or retribution-in-kind, for murder. In a single day in April 2025, four men were put to death across three provinces, the highest one-day total since the Taliban returned to power.2Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Afghanistan Must Immediately Stop Public Executions and Corporal Punishment – UN Experts In 2022, Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada ordered judges to fully implement all aspects of sharia as the Taliban interprets it, providing the legal basis for these killings.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia historically carried out weekly beheadings by sword in public squares. The kingdom executed at least 345 people in 2024, a sharp increase from prior years, with a large share of those executions tied to drug smuggling. Recent reporting indicates that the most prominent public execution sites have been repurposed and that much of the kingdom’s execution activity has moved out of public view. Whether individual executions still take place before open crowds is difficult to confirm independently, as Saudi authorities provide limited transparency.
China
China officially banned public executions in 1979 and reinforced that prohibition through later directives from its highest courts and law enforcement agencies. The country remains the world’s leading executioner overall, with human rights organizations estimating thousands of deaths annually, though exact figures are classified as state secrets. Despite the formal ban, Chinese authorities continue to hold large public sentencing rallies where judges announce death sentences and other harsh punishments before assembled crowds, sometimes in sports stadiums. These rallies target drug offenders and organized crime groups and are, in official language, designed to “maintain social stability.”
How Modern Public Executions Are Carried Out
The methods used today are crude compared to the elaborate scaffolding of historical European hangings, but they are engineered for maximum visibility. Iran’s crane hangings are the most widely documented example. A mobile construction crane is driven to a public location, and the condemned person is hoisted by a noose attached to the crane’s arm. Because the drop is minimal or nonexistent, death comes from asphyxiation over several minutes rather than instantaneously. The height of the crane ensures that large crowds can watch from a distance.1European Union Agency for Asylum. Article 15(a) QD/QR – Death Penalty or Execution
North Korea’s standard method is the firing squad, with multiple soldiers firing simultaneously, typically three shooters firing three rounds each. These executions take place in open fields, marketplaces, and occasionally inside detention facilities. In Saudi Arabia, the traditional method is beheading by sword, carried out by a state-appointed executioner while the condemned person kneels blindfolded.
Authorities often broadcast the charges and sentence to the assembled crowd before carrying out the killing. The event is structured as a demonstration of state power. Medical personnel are sometimes present to confirm death, but the proceedings are otherwise built around spectacle rather than clinical efficiency.
The Last Public Execution in the United States
Rainey Bethea was publicly hanged on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, making him the last person executed in public on American soil. Bethea had confessed to the rape and murder of 70-year-old Lischia Edwards, but prosecutors charged him only with rape. Under Kentucky law at the time, murder carried a death sentence by electric chair at the state penitentiary, while rape required a public hanging in the county where the crime occurred.3Death Penalty Information Center. Kentucky
An estimated 20,000 people showed up. Vendors sold food and souvenirs while spectators climbed trees and rooftops to see the wooden gallows. The presiding official was supposed to be Florence Thompson, the county sheriff and the first woman ever assigned to carry out an execution in the United States. Thompson refused to pull the lever and handed the job to a former Louisville police officer named Arthur Hash. The actual hanging was clumsy and drew sharp criticism from reporters covering the event.
Wire services ran exaggerated accounts of an unruly mob tearing souvenirs from the body, though firsthand witnesses later disputed those details. The national embarrassment landed on Owensboro and on the broader practice of open-air execution. Two years later, Kentucky Governor Chandler signed Senate Bill 69, which repealed the law requiring public hangings for rape convictions. Executions across the country moved inside prison facilities, with attendance restricted to small groups of authorized witnesses.4U.S. Department of Justice. Office of the Attorney General
The Last Public Execution in France
Three years after Bethea, France staged its own final public execution. Eugen Weidmann, a German-born serial killer convicted of six murders during a robbery spree, was guillotined on June 17, 1939, outside Saint-Pierre Prison in Versailles.5France ONU. Abolition of the Death Penalty The execution took place in the early morning, but daylight was already strong enough for photographers and at least one film crew to capture the entire event in sharp detail.
The crowd treated the guillotining as entertainment. Witnesses described cheering, laughing, and chaotic surges toward the execution site. Some spectators reportedly dipped handkerchiefs in blood as keepsakes. Édouard Daladier, who headed the French government at the time, issued a decree shortly afterward banning all future executions from public view. The guillotine remained France’s official method for nearly four more decades, but every subsequent use took place behind prison walls. France abolished the death penalty entirely on October 9, 1981.5France ONU. Abolition of the Death Penalty
The Last Public Execution in England
England’s final public execution predates both the American and French cases by nearly 70 years. Michael Barrett was hanged on May 26, 1868, before a large crowd outside Newgate Prison in London. Barrett had been convicted of involvement in a Fenian bombing at Clerkenwell that killed several people. Three days after the hanging, Parliament finalized legislation requiring all future executions to take place within prison walls. By late August of that year, England had officially entered its era of private hangings.
International Law and Public Execution
International law treats public execution as a violation of fundamental human rights, though enforcement mechanisms remain weak. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the vast majority of the world’s nations, prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under Article 7. The UN Human Rights Committee, which interprets the treaty, evaluates whether treatment violates Article 7 based on the severity of the act, its physical and mental effects, and the manner in which it is carried out. The prohibition is absolute, meaning no emergency or security justification overrides it.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has stated that the death penalty is inconsistent with “the right to life and the right to live free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”6OHCHR. Death Penalty General Comment No. 36 on Article 6 of the ICCPR, adopted in 2018, further tightened the safeguards that states must follow if they retain capital punishment at all. Public execution, by its nature, adds a layer of degradation and spectacle that international bodies view as compounding the human rights violation beyond the act of killing itself.
None of this has stopped the governments that still practice public execution. Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan have either not ratified the relevant treaties or ignore them in practice.2Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Afghanistan Must Immediately Stop Public Executions and Corporal Punishment – UN Experts Until that gap closes, any “last public execution” will remain a national milestone rather than a global one.