ESTONIA: After Socrates

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Since Socrates, after considerable palaver, raised the poison cup of hemlock and escaped the indignity of public execution, modern nations have decided that a man under sentence of death who kills himself is cheating the law. Sole exception is the dignified little Baltic State of Estonia. Until a thwarted Nazi putsch so alarmed President Konstantin Pats last year that he declared a state of martial law, Estonia had ignored the death penalty entirely. Confronted with the new problem of how to execute Estonians, President Pats devised a system of taking them into a forest near Tallinn and shooting them, always in a different glade. This stirred so much criticism that finally the President thought up a better system: the prisoner might have the choice of hanging or downing a cup of poison. Should the poison fail to work in five minutes, he should be hanged anyway.

First suicide candidate was a convicted matricide, who indignantly refused President Pats's poison cup and was hanged. Second was Paul Voigemast, 24, a laborer convicted of raping and murdering a middle-aged schoolteacher. Thoughtful Paul Voigemast reserved decision, entered into a long correspondence with the faculty of Dorpat University on the subject of fast-working, pleasant poisons. Finally Paul Voigemast chose a cup of diluted potassium cyanide. Last week he was led to the death chamber, offered the cup. His hand took it steadily. Without expression, he drained it, shuddered, took in one long hissing breath, fell down dead, all within the required five minutes.