An instance ofThreadDeath is thrown in the victim thread when the (deprecated)Thread.stop() method is invoked.

An application should catch instances of this class only if it must clean up after being terminated asynchronously. IfThreadDeath is caught by a method, it is important that it be rethrown so that the thread actually dies.

Thetop-level error handler does not print out a message ifThreadDeath is never caught.

The classThreadDeath is specifically a subclass ofError rather thanException, even though it is a "normal occurrence", because many applications catch all occurrences ofException and then discard the exception.