I was on tour in Scotland with my friend Martin Frizzell, with whom I present the podcast This Much is True Crime a few months ago. On the Edinburgh leg of the tour, we stayed at a hotel in the Grassmarket in the city’s magical Old Town, just opposite Maggie Dickson’s pub. If you know Edinburgh well, you will also be aware that there’s a plaque dedicated to "half hangit Maggie", a fishmonger from Musselburgh who was convicted under the Concealment of Pregnancy Act and sentenced to die in September 1724.

Maggie was duly hanged, even though there was no evidence that she had actually murdered her prematurely born baby and, after being cut down from the scaffold by her family, placed in a coffin to be transported back to their home where she was to be buried. On the journey, noises were heard coming from inside the coffin, and when it was opened, far from being dead, Maggie sat bolt upright and complained of a sore neck.

The hangman had clearly miscalculated "the drop" and so Maggie had slowly been strangled into unconsciousness, rather than being killed by having her neck broken.

The High Court of Scotland were therefore left in a quandary: should they hang Maggie again?

An 17th century execution in Edinburgh (Image: Getty)

I’ve thought a great deal about Maggie Dickson over the past few days when watching the news in horror at the attempted execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. Convicted of the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1996, committed with her then boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, prison officials at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville twice injected Christa with........

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