Capital punishment in Canada
The last execution in Canada was the double hanging of Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin on December 11, 1962, at Toronto's Don Jail.
[3] After an intervention by the Jesuits in Quebec City, the drummer's life was spared on the condition that he accept the position of New France's first permanent executioner.
[3] As only the drummer was placed on trial, some historians have suggested that his sexual partner may have been a First Nations man who was not subject to French religious law.
[4] The drummer's real name has never been confirmed in historical records, however; in his 2006 book Répression des homosexuels au Québec et en France, historian Patrice Corriveau identified the drummer as "René Huguet dit Tambour",[5] although other historians have challenged this identification as no known historical records place a person of that name in New France any earlier than 1680.
[9] In 1749, Peter Cartcel, a sailor aboard a ship in the Halifax harbour, stabbed Abraham Goodsides to death and wounded two other men.
[11] In 1840, an innocent man was hanged in what is now Windsor, Ontario, and this was learned after the true perpetrator of the crime had made a deathbed confession.
[13] By the 1870s, the jails had begun to build the gallows 5 feet (1.5 m) from the ground with a pit underneath instead of the previous high scaffold, the platform of which was level with the prison wall.
[14] Robert Bickerdike was a businessman, politician, and social reformer, who believed the abolition of capital punishment was an imperative and to some extent his life’s mission.
He opposed capital punishment on many grounds, considering it an insult to Christianity and religion in general and a blot on any civilized nation.
On November 30, 1967, Bill C-168 was passed creating a five-year moratorium on the use of the death penalty, except for murders of police and corrections officers.
[18] On July 14, 1976, Bill C-84 was passed by a narrow margin of 130:124 in a free vote, resulting in the abolition of the death penalty for murder, treason, and piracy.
[26][2] The last two people executed in Canada were Ronald Turpin, 29, and Arthur Lucas, 54, convicted of separate murders, at 12:02 am on December 11, 1962, at the Don Jail in Toronto.
[27] [28] [29] The last woman to be hanged in Canada was Marguerite Pitre on January 9, 1953, at Bordeaux Prison in Montreal, for her part in the bombing of Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108.
The hangman was traditionally based in Montreal where between 1912 and 1960 the gallows at Bordeaux Prison saw more executions (85) take place than any other correctional facility in Canada.
[40] The majority of offenders put to death by Canadian civilian authorities were executed by long drop hanging developed in the United Kingdom by William Marwood.
[citation needed] Early in his career, John Radclive persuaded several sheriffs in Ontario and Quebec to let him use an alternative method in which the condemned person was jerked into the air.
A gallows of this type was used for the execution of Robert Neil at Toronto's Don Jail on February 29, 1888: The old plan of a "drop" was discarded for a more merciful machine, by which the prisoner is jerked up from a platform on the ground level by a weight of 280 lb [130 kg], which is suspended by an independent rope pending the execution … At the words "Forgive us our trespasses," the executioner drove his chisel against the light rope that held the ponderous iron at the other end of the noose, and in an instant the heavy weight fell with a thud, and the pinioned body was jerked into the air and hung dangling between the rough posts of the scaffold.
[citation needed] While hanging was a relatively humane method of execution under ideal conditions with an expert executioner, mistakes could and did happen.
[42] Some Canadian jails—such as those in Toronto, Whitby and Ottawa, Ontario; Headingley, Manitoba; and Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta—had permanent indoor execution facilities, but more typically offenders were hanged on a scaffold built for the occasion in the jail yard.
However, almost half of Canadians (47%) select life imprisonment without the possibility of parole over the death penalty (34%) as their preferred punishment in cases of murder.
[citation needed] Among the reasons cited for banning capital punishment in Canada were fears about wrongful convictions, concerns about the state taking people's lives, and uncertainty about the death penalty's role as a deterrent for crime.
[53] In the 1990s, Canada extradited a criminal, Charles Ng to the United States, even though he appealed to the authorities, as he did not want to potentially face execution.
[56] In November 2007, Canada's minority Conservative government reversed a longstanding policy of automatically requesting clemency for Canadian citizens sentenced to capital punishment.
The ongoing case of Alberta-born Ronald Allen Smith, who has been on death row in the United States since 1982 after being convicted of murdering two people and who continues to seek calls for clemency from the Canadian government, prompted Canadian Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day to announce the change in policy.
