Читать книгу Drop Dead - Lorna Poplak - Страница 7

T he condemned man clutched the wooden handrail of the prisoner’s box, waiting for his sentence.

The judge was wearing a black cap and black gloves when he swept back into the courtroom. Slowly and deliberately, he sat down at the bench and began to read: “Prisoner at the Bar, it becomes my painful duty to pass the final sentence of the law upon you. You have been found guilty of murder. You will be taken from here to the place whence you came and there be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Death by hanging — a long-standing Canadian tradition.

Capital punishment, the execution of someone found guilty of a crime, dates back to the arrival of European explorers on our shores. In those days, if you were condemned to death, quite a wide range of methods could be used to punish you. You could be hanged, or face a firing squad, or be burned at the stake. You might even be put to death by a multiplicity of methods. For example, just after the first proper settlement was established in Quebec City in 1608, explorer Samuel de Champlain learned that a locksmith named Jean Duval was conspiring to kill him. Duval was arrested, found guilty, hanged, and strangled. Then his head was cut off and stuck on a pike on the highest rooftop of the fort, as “food for birds,” according to the nineteenth-century American historian Francis Parkman — a stark warning to other settlers who might be considering similar schemes. The display was also meant to serve as a stern message to the local Indigenous peoples that the newcomers meant business.

Samuel de Champlain, explorer, cartographer, and administrator of the colony of Quebec. Originally taken as authentic, this image was later found to be a false portrait, based on a 1654 engraving of Michel Particelli d’Emery.

In 1763, the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the first global conflict in history, saw Britain and her allies victorious and France defeated. Large swaths of previously French-owned mainland North America, including Quebec, fell under the sovereignty of Britain. Although Canada remained a collection of separate British colonies until Confederation in 1867, a Royal Proclamation in 1763 replaced the prevailing Canadian legal system with the laws of England.

Within the criminal justice system, the British strongly favoured hanging for the punishment of capital crimes, preferably in a marketplace or similarly busy area to ensure a large audience. Why hanging? Historically, other methods were used, such as beheading for high-born folk or burning at the stake for heretics. But traditionally, the most common form of capital punishment since Saxon times was hanging. The thinking was that, even without optional extras like beheading, hanging was a pretty nasty sentence, well befitting felons found guilty of heinous crimes. By the end of the 1700s in Britain, however, the litany of crimes regarded as sufficiently horrible to warrant the death penalty had swelled to 220, including such nefarious acts as keeping company with gypsies or skulking in the dark with a blackened face.

In Canada, too, public hangings based on the English model gradually became the only method of dealing with serious crimes. As in Britain, the list was long: in the early 1800s, people were sentenced to death by hanging for more than a hundred different offences. Fraud and burglary were on the list. Two men, N. Ganson and A. Jeffreys, were hanged in 1821 for passing forged bills. In 1828, Patrick Burgan of Saint John, New Brunswick, aged eighteen or nineteen, received the death penalty for the double offence of stealing a watch and some money from his former employer and clothing from a sailors’ boarding house. Given the power and pre-eminence of religion in Canada at that time, your very life would have been in jeopardy if you were caught scrawling slogans on the side of a church. You could also be hanged for stealing your neighbour’s cow, which was the fate of B. Clement of Montreal. And just in case you thought that the law protected the young as it does today, think again. Children were regarded as mini­ature adults and treated as such — Clement was only thirteen years old when executed.

In 1859, the catalogue of crimes in the statutes of the United Province of Canada (Ontario and Quebec today) was reduced to a more manageable number. On the list were “murder, rape, treason, administering poison or wounding with intent to commit murder, unlawfully abusing a girl under ten, buggery with man or beast, robbery with wounding, burglary with assault, arson, casting away a ship, and exhibiting a false signal endangering a ship.”

By 1865, the number of capital crimes had been pared down further. Out went buggery and burglary and arson; from then on, only murder, rape, and treason were punishable by death.

July 1, 1867, marked the date of Confederation: precisely at noon, the two new provinces of Ontario and Quebec, together with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, joined to form the Dominion of Canada, with John A. Macdonald as its first prime minister.

By 1905, a uniform criminal code had been rolled out to the Northwest Territories, Yukon Territory, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island as they all folded into the Dominion. Newfoundland was a latecomer in 1949. Nunavut, the newest territory, was carved out of the existing Northwest Territories in 1999, more than twenty years after capital punishment was abolished.

According to the official inventory of Department of Justice cap­ital case files, over the course of the 109 years from Confederation until 1976, when the death penalty for civil (as opposed to military) crimes was removed from Canadian law books, 704 people were hanged, 11 of them women, and all but one of them for murder. Louis Riel, the Métis leader from Manitoba who launched two rebellions against the Canadian government in the late 1800s, was the lone exception. He was executed for high treason.

This horrible history of hanging in Canada will focus on the period between Confederation and the abolition of the death penalty. It is a story of murder (and one treason) and hanging. It begins with a double slaying in St-Zéphirin, Quebec, and effectively ends in 1962 with a double execution in Toronto, Ontario, although another fourteen years would elapse before capital punishment was finally abolished.

You will meet men, women, and children, those who were hanged and those who escaped the noose. You will meet judges and jurors and police officers and farmers and hookers and gangsters and ghosts. Above all, you will encounter the hangman and find out how he was affected by his job. You will be introduced to the science and art of hanging, and you will see what can happen when things go terribly wrong.

Hanging was a harsh reality during the first century after the Confederation of Canada. Does the topic still have relevance today, or is it a dark chapter best relegated to the faded annals of our past?

Some crimes are so horrific that a life sentence doesn’t seem adequate. Consider Canadian serial killers Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, and Russell Williams. In each case, a call was made for the return of the death penalty. Canada’s last hangman, John Ellis, was a firm believer in capital punishment. And even though the death penalty was eliminated in Canada more than forty years ago, a 2013 poll found that 63 percent of Canadians still agreed with him.

Could we — should we — reinstate the death penalty?

At the end of this history, you be the judge.