Botting worked as the state's instrument of death at a time when public execution was both legal spectacle and social ritual, officiating at Newgate during a period when capital punishment extended to crimes far beyond violence. His tenure included the beheading that followed the Cato Street hangings — the last legal public decapitation in England — marking him as a figure present at a grim threshold in penal history. The report that he died alone in the street, with no passerby willing to help, suggests the depth of personal revulsion his role inspired, distinct from any abstract objection to the institution itself.