Five people lived through the moment that was supposed to kill them.
Most death sentences end exactly where everyone expects them to. These did not.
One prisoner watched three ropes fail. Another woke up on a table where doctors were preparing to dissect her. A third survived something far harder to explain away as faulty equipment.
Here are five people who lived through their own execution attempts.
#5 Joseph Samuel: Three Ropes, Three Failures
Joseph Samuel arrived in Australia as a teenage convict after being sentenced to transportation for theft in England. By 1803, he had become involved in a robbery that ended with Constable Joseph Luker being murdered.
Samuel confessed to taking part in the robbery but blamed another man for the killing. The evidence surrounding the murder was complicated, and the other suspects were eventually released. Samuel, however, was convicted of the robbery and sentenced to death.
His execution was scheduled for September 26, 1803, at Brickfield Hill near Sydney.
Samuel was taken to the gallows alongside another condemned man, James Hardwicke. Hardwicke received a last-minute pardon, leaving Samuel to face the execution alone.
The cart beneath him was moved away.
Samuel dropped, lost consciousness and fell face-first onto the ground when the rope snapped.
Officials lifted him back onto the cart and brought out another rope. This time, the noose unraveled before the hanging could kill him.
They tried once more.
The third rope also snapped.
By then, the crowd had stopped treating the failures as faulty equipment. People began shouting that Samuel was innocent and that something beyond ordinary luck was keeping him alive. The ropes were later tested and were reportedly strong enough to support approximately 132 kilograms each.
The provost marshal rode away to contact Governor Philip Gidley King. Samuel, injured and partially strangled after three attempts, was eventually granted a reprieve. Governor King reportedly viewed the repeated failures as divine intervention.
Samuel recovered and was sent to work at the penal settlement in Newcastle rather than returned to the gallows. Three years later, he escaped with several other convicts in a small boat. The vessel disappeared, and everyone aboard was presumed drowned.
His body was never found.
#4 Willie Francis: The Electric Chair That Failed
Willie Francis was 16 years old when an all-white jury in Louisiana convicted him of murdering pharmacist Andrew Thomas in 1945.
The case against Francis would later attract serious criticism. Questions were raised about his confession, the quality of his legal representation and whether the evidence was strong enough to justify a death sentence. None of that stopped Louisiana from scheduling his execution.
On May 3, 1946, Francis was taken to the parish jail in St. Martinville. Louisiana used a portable electric chair that traveled between parishes. It had acquired the cheerful nickname “Gruesome Gertie,” in case the purpose of the machine was somehow unclear.
Francis was strapped into the chair, a leather hood was placed over his head and the switch was thrown.
The current passed through his body.
He did not die.
Something had gone wrong with the equipment. Later accounts blamed the failure on the chair being improperly assembled, possibly by an intoxicated prison guard and inmate. The official Supreme Court record was more cautious, describing it only as a mechanical difficulty.
Whatever caused it, the result was the same. Francis remained conscious through the attempt and reportedly begged for the equipment to be removed.
Officials took him out of the chair and returned him to his cell.
His attorneys argued that forcing him through another execution would violate the Constitution’s protections against double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment. The question eventually reached the United States Supreme Court.
In January 1947, the Court ruled five to four that Louisiana could try again. The majority treated the first failure as an accident rather than a completed punishment. Four dissenting justices disagreed, arguing that making Francis endure the process a second time crossed a constitutional line.
Francis remained on death row for more than a year after surviving the first attempt.
On May 9, 1947, Louisiana placed him back in the same portable electric chair. He was 18 years old.
This time, the chair worked.
#3 John “Babbacombe” Lee: The Trapdoor That Refused to Open
John Lee was convicted of murdering his employer, Emma Keyse, at her home in Babbacombe, England, in November 1884.
The case against him was largely circumstantial. Lee was the only adult man living in the house, had a previous theft conviction and was found with an unexplained cut on his arm. He denied killing Keyse and continued claiming innocence after being sentenced to death.
His execution was scheduled for February 23, 1885, inside Exeter Prison.
Executioner James Berry inspected the scaffold before Lee arrived. The trapdoor opened correctly when tested, and nothing appeared to be wrong with the mechanism.
Lee was brought forward, his arms were secured and a noose was placed around his neck. Berry pulled the lever.
Nothing happened.
The trapdoor remained closed beneath Lee’s feet.
Officials removed him from the scaffold and tested the mechanism again. Without Lee standing on it, the doors opened normally. He was brought back, the noose was replaced and the lever was pulled again.
The trapdoor refused to move.
Most versions of the story describe three failed attempts, although Berry’s later memoir and a letter he wrote about the execution appear to mention only two. Either way, officials had reached a deeply uncomfortable point: the scaffold worked perfectly until the condemned man stood on it.
The prison’s medical officer eventually refused to continue. Lee was returned to his cell while the Home Office investigated what had happened.
The problem was not supernatural. Investigators concluded that part of the trapdoor mechanism had been installed or aligned incorrectly. When Lee’s weight pressed down on the doors, the wood bent just enough to jam them against the surrounding structure.
Home Secretary William Harcourt commuted Lee’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Plenty of people saw the repeated failures as proof that Lee was innocent or had been spared by divine intervention. The government settled on faulty carpentry.
Lee spent more than two decades in prison before being released in 1907. He later sold the story of his life, appeared at public lectures and became the subject of films and books.
Whatever happened to him afterward remains surprisingly difficult to trace. Some evidence suggests that he moved to the United States and died in Milwaukee in 1945.
By then, his real name had almost become secondary. Most people knew him simply as the Man They Could Not Hang.
#2 Anne Greene Woke Up on the Anatomy Table
Anne Greene was a young domestic servant in Oxfordshire when she became pregnant by the grandson of her employer.
In 1650, she miscarried after approximately 17 weeks. Greene said the child had been stillborn, and medical evidence apparently supported her account. Under a harsh English law aimed at unmarried women who concealed a pregnancy, however, she was presumed guilty of murder unless she could prove otherwise.
Greene had very little power to defend herself. She was convicted and sentenced to death.
On December 14, 1650, she was taken to the gallows at Oxford Castle. Greene reportedly asked friends to pull down on her body after the drop, hoping to shorten her suffering. She was eventually cut down, declared dead and placed inside a coffin.
Her body belonged to Oxford University’s anatomists, who had permission to dissect people executed near the city.
The following day, physicians opened Greene’s coffin and prepared to examine her body.
Then someone heard a faint sound in her throat.
They checked again and discovered that she still had a pulse.
Instead of beginning the dissection, the physicians tried to revive her. They worked to warm her body, used restoratives and placed her beneath heated blankets. According to Oxford’s historical account, another woman was brought into the bed to share body heat.
Slowly, Greene began breathing more strongly. She eventually opened her eyes and regained consciousness.
News spread quickly. People came to see the woman who had returned from the gallows, sometimes paying for the privilege. Her survival was widely treated as divine intervention, particularly because many believed she had been wrongly convicted in the first place.
Greene’s former employer reportedly pushed for the execution to be attempted again. The physicians who saved her argued for mercy instead.
She was eventually pardoned.
Her recovery became famous enough to inspire a 1651 pamphlet titled Newes from the Dead, along with more than two dozen poems written in several languages. Accounts suggest that she went on to marry, have children and live for years after the execution.
Anne Greene had survived the hanging, being pronounced dead and delivery to the people preparing to dissect her.
Fortunately, they checked for a pulse first.
#1 Wenceslao Moguel Survived the Firing Squad
Wenceslao Moguel Herrera became known across Mexico as El Fusilado, which roughly means “the man who was shot.”
It was not a nickname anyone would volunteer to earn.
In March 1915, fighting connected to the Mexican Revolution reached the town of Halachó in Yucatán. Moguel was among the local fighters captured after forces loyal to Salvador Alvarado defeated the poorly equipped opposition.
The prisoners were lined up for execution.
What happened next has been retold so many times that some details have become difficult to separate from legend. Sources disagree about Moguel’s age, the exact date and how many bullets struck him.
The central story, however, remained consistent when Moguel later described it himself: the firing squad shot him, an officer delivered a final close-range shot intended to ensure his death, and he survived.
Some accounts say Moguel was struck eight times before the final shot. Others give a smaller number. The last bullet reportedly passed through part of his face or jaw without reaching his brain.
Moguel stayed motionless among the bodies until the soldiers left.
According to later versions of the story, he eventually managed to move and was discovered or helped by a local woman. He received medical treatment and spent time hiding while his injuries healed.
The damage remained visible for the rest of his life. Photographs taken years later show extensive scarring along one side of his face, physical evidence that made his story considerably harder to dismiss as a convenient legend.
Moguel eventually became famous beyond Mexico. In 1937, he appeared with Robert Ripley on the radio program Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and told an American audience how he had survived the firing squad.
He later returned to Yucatán, raised a family and lived until 1976. A book about his life was published under a title that translated roughly as The Miracle of the Saint of Halachó, or the Story of a Man Who Was Shot.
The exact bullet count may never be settled. Neither may every detail of how Moguel escaped afterward.
What is not seriously disputed is that he stood before a firing squad in 1915 and lived for more than 60 years after it.
The other people on this list survived broken ropes, a jammed trapdoor or a malfunctioning machine. Moguel survived the bullets themselves. That puts him at Number 1.
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