Editing Decapitation (section)

==== United States ====
The United States government has never employed beheading as a legal method of execution. However, beheading has sometimes been used in mutilations of the dead, particularly of black people like [[Nat Turner]], who led a rebellion against slavery. When caught, he was publicly hanged, flayed, and beheaded. This was a technique used by many enslavers to discourage the "frequent bloody uprisings" that were carried out by "kidnapped Africans". While bodily dismemberment of various kinds was employed to instill terror, Dr. Erasmus D. Fenner noted postmortem decapitation was particularly effective.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Washington |first1=Harriet A. |date=2006 |publisher=Doubleday |title=Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present |location=New York. London. Toronto. Sydney. Austin. |page=126, paragraph 3}}</ref>

During the [[Vietnam War]], as a terror tactic, "some American troops hacked the heads off... dead [Vietnamese] and mounted them on pikes or poles".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Turse |first1=Nick |title=Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam |date=2013 |publisher=Metropolitan Books |location=New York |page=163}}</ref> Correspondent Michael Herr noted "thousands" of photo-albums made by US soldiers "all seemed to contain the same pictures": "the severed head shot, the head often resting on the chest of the dead man or being held up by a smiling Marine, or a lot of the heads, arranged in a row, with a burning cigarette in each of the mouths, the eyes open". Some of the victims were "very young".<ref>{{cite book|last1=Turse |first1=Nick |title=Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam |date=2013 |publisher=Metropolitan Books |location=New York |page=162}}</ref>

{{anchor|George S. Patton III}}
General [[George Patton IV]], son of the famous WWII general [[George S. Patton]], was known for keeping "macabre souvenirs", such as "a Vietnamese skull that sat on his desk." Other Americans "hacked the heads off Vietnamese to keep, trade, or exchange for prizes offered by commanders."<ref>{{cite book|last1=Turse |first1=Nick |title=Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam |date=2013 |publisher=Metropolitan Books |location=New York |page=161}}</ref>

Although the [[Utah Territory]] permitted a person sentenced to death to choose beheading as a means of execution, no person chose that option, and it was dropped when [[Utah]] became a state.<ref>{{cite book |last=Miller |first=Wilbur R. |title=The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia |year=2012 |publisher=Sage |isbn=978-1-4129-8876-6 |oclc=768569594 |page=1856 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tYME6Z35nyAC&pg=PA1856}}</ref>