Oh, I know how the experts give expert judgment that the fall through the trap breaks the victim's neck.

And the victims, like Shakespeare's traveller, never return to testify to the contrary.

But we who have lived in the stir know of the cases that are hushed in the prison crypts, where the victim's necks are not broken.
It is a funny thing, this hanging of a man.

I have never seen a hanging, but I have been told by eye-witnesses the details of a dozen hangings so that I know what will happen to me.

Standing on the trap, leg-manacled and arm-manacled, the knot against the neck, the black cap drawn, they will drop me down until the momentum of my descending weight is fetched up abruptly short by the tautening of the rope.