Capital punishment in Canada
Capital punishment in Canada dates to Canada's earliest history, including its period as first a French and then a British colony. From 1867 to the elimination of the death penalty for murder on July 26, 1976, 1,481 people had been sentenced to death, and 710 had been executed. Of those executed, 697 were men and 13 were women. The only method used in Canada for capital punishment of civilians after the end of the French regime was hanging. The last execution in Canada was the double hanging of Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin on December 11, 1962, at Toronto's Don Jail. The National Defence Act prescribed the death penalty for certain military offences until 1999, albeit no military executions had been carried out since 1946.
The death penalty was ended in practice in Canada in January 1963 and was abolished in two stages, in 1976 and 1999. Prior to 1976, the death penalty was prescribed under the Criminal Code as the punishment for murder, treason, and piracy. In addition, some service offences under the National Defence Act continued to carry a mandatory death sentence if committed traitorously, although no one had been executed for those offences since 1945. In 1976, Parliament enacted Bill C-84, abolishing the death penalty for murder, treason, and piracy. In December 1998, Parliament passed legislation to eliminate the death penalty for the military offences. The legislation came into force on September 1, 1999.
History
New France
The post of executioner in New France was briefly held by André Bernard in 1645, but was not permanently occupied until 1648, when a military drummer stationed at the French garrison in Ville-Marie, New France, was sentenced to death for sodomy by the local Sulpician priests. 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. 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. 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, 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.With the role of executioner being unpopular, it was common in New France that a male criminal who had been sentenced to death could have his life spared if he agreed to take the job of executing others, while a female prisoner could have her life spared if the executioner agreed to marry her. Similar cases included Jacques Daigre, who was sentenced to death for theft in 1665 but managed to avoid being executed by agreeing to testify against and execute his associate, and Jean Corolère, who took the job in 1751 and simultaneously saved the life of fellow prisoner Françoise Laurent by marrying her.
British North America
In 1749, Peter Cartcel, a sailor aboard a ship in the Halifax harbour, stabbed Abraham Goodsides to death and wounded two other men. He was brought before a Captain's Court where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Two days later he was hanged from the yardarm of the vessel as a deterrent to others. This is one of the earliest records of capital punishment in English-speaking Canada. It is difficult to accurately state numbers of capital punishment since there were no systematic efforts to accurately record names, dates, and locations of executions until after 1867, and many records have been lost because of fires, floods, or decay.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. This contributed to the abolition of capital punishment in Michigan across the river from Windsor.
Post-Confederation
After Confederation, a revision of the statutes reduced the number of offences punishable by death to three: murder, rape, and treason. In 1868, Parliament also stated that the location of the execution was to be within the confines of the prison instead of public hangings. By the 1870s, the jails had begun to build the gallows from the ground with a pit underneath instead of the previous high scaffold, the platform of which was level with the prison wall.In 1950, an attempt was made to abolish capital punishment. Ross Thatcher, at that time a Cooperative Commonwealth Federation Member of Parliament, moved Bill No. 2 in order to amend the Criminal Code to abolish the death penalty. Thatcher later withdrew it for fear of Bill No. 2 not generating positive discussion and further harming the chances of abolition. In 1956, the Joint Committee of the House and Senate recommended the retention of capital punishment as the mandatory punishment for murder, which opened the door to the possibility of abolition.
Limitations
Canada abolished the death penalty for rape in 1954, albeit nobody had been executed in a non-fatal rape case since Canadian Confederation in 1867. In 1927, William James McCathern, a 38-year-old black man, was sentenced to death for beating and raping his employer Alice McColl, a well-known and respected 81-year-old white woman, in Ontario on October 29, 1926. McCathern's death sentence was deemed too harsh by the Court of Appeal for Ontario and reduced to 20 years in prison plus 20 lashes. He was paroled in the 1930s and died on January 24, 1941, at age of 52, after being struck by a car.McCathern's death sentence has been cited as a case of institutional racism in the judicial system. Although his guilt was not in question, his trial was held in a racist atmosphere and his sentence was seen as highly unusual, as nobody in Canada had been sentenced to death for rape since 1875. In contrast, in 1926, four white men had been spared death sentences after being convicted in the brutal gang rape of a 20-year-old white woman alongside a road in an isolated area near St. Catharines. The victim had gone for a car ride with a male friend when the four perpetrators, pretending to be police officers, stopped them under the pretense of searching the car for liquor. As one of the men stood talking to the girl's friend, the other three took the woman down the road and then took turns raping her. The judge sentenced three of the men to 15 years in prison and the fourth to 10 years in prison. The Court of Appeal for Ontario later ruled that the sentences for the three men who received 15-year sentences were too lenient and ordered that they also receive 20 lashes. In its ruling, the court stated: "It is almost impossible to imagine a worse case than that in which the four men took part." At the hearing, the defence for one of the men had asked, "Are you going to wreck the lives of these men?", to which Chief Justice Francis Robert Latchford replied, "The girl's life was pretty well wrecked." The prosecutor, who described the incident as "the most outrageous and horrible" rape case to ever occur in Ontario, said he would have asked for the death penalty had there been even "the smallest chance of having them hanged."
In July 1961, Canada adopted legislation to reclassify murder into capital and non-capital murder. A capital murder involved a planned and deliberate murder, murder during violent crimes, or the murder of a police officer or prison guard. Non-capital murder did not carry the death sentence, and juvenile offenders convicted of capital murder were to receive life sentences instead, thus officially raising the minimum execution age to 18. The last juvenile offender to be executed in Canada was Lloyd Wellington Simcoe, who was hanged on December 20, 1945, for a murder committed 17 days before his 18th birthday. The law went into effect on September 1, 1961. However, the only death sentences carried out after the reform were that of Turpin and Lucas. Turpin was hanged for murdering a police officer and Lucas was hanged for premeditated murder.
Abolition
Following the success of Lester Pearson and the Liberal Party in the 1963 federal election, and through the successive governments of Pierre Trudeau, the federal cabinet commuted all death sentences as a matter of policy. Hence, in practice the death penalty ceased to be used in Canada in 1963. 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. On January 26, 1973, after the expiration of the five-year experiment, the Solicitor General of Canada continued the partial ban on capital punishment, which would eventually lead to the abolition of capital punishment. 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. It was given royal assent on July 16 and came into force July 26, 1976.Capital murder was replaced with first degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence without eligibility for parole until the person has served 25 years of the sentence. Non-capital murder was replaced with second degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence without eligibility for parole for at least 10 years and up to 25 years, at the discretion of the judge.
On June 30, 1987, a bill to restore the death penalty was defeated by the House of Commons in a 148–127 vote, in which Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Minister of Justice Ray Hnatyshyn, and Minister of External Affairs Joe Clark opposed the bill, while Deputy Prime Minister Donald Mazankowski and a majority of Progressive Conservative MPs supported it.
Certain military offences under the National Defence Act continued to carry the death penalty, with mandatory death penalty if committed traitorously. Bill C-25 replaced those death penalties with life imprisonment, resulting in the complete legal abolition of the death penalty in Canada, effective September 1, 1999.