The Rare Survival of Judicial Beheading

While once a standard punishment throughout history, judicial beheading is now almost entirely extinct globally. Today, only a handful of jurisdictions worldwide still maintain it as a legal method of execution.

Decapitation was a common form of capital punishment in pre-modern law, but it has been largely abandoned over the last century. Only Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and one Nigerian state currently keep it on the books. While some extremist groups have used the act as a modern terror tactic, it remains functionally absent from the actual legal systems of nearly every other nation.