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. The drummer's real name has never been confirmed in historical records; however, in his 2006 book , 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 , March 21, 1902,
Hull, Quebec. At top right, onlookers watch from telephone poles. 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." 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 (committed by members of the
Canadian Armed Forces) continued to carry the death penalty (cowardice, desertion, unlawful surrender, and spying for the enemy), 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. The last woman to be executed in Canada was
Marguerite Pitre on January 9, 1953, at
Bordeaux Prison in Montreal, for her role in the bombing of
Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108. Another six Canadian soldiers, including
August Sangret, were executed for murder in Britain after being tried by civilian courts under
English law. After World War II, four German war criminals were executed by the
Royal Canadian Air Force for crimes against Canadian POWs following investigations by Canadian War Crimes Investigation Unit. On 15 April 1946, Wilhelm Jung and Johann and Johann Georg Schumacher were executed by firing squad for the murder of a Canadian prisoner. On 11 May 1946, Robert Hölzer and Walter Weigel were executed by firing squad for the murder of three Canadian prisoners. These were the last executions by firing squad by Canada. Five German POWs convicted of the murders of other POWs were executed in Canada in 1946. Four of them were among the five executed in Canada's last mass execution on 18 December 1946. However, their trials and executions took place under Canadian civil, rather than military, law and authority.
Executioners John Radclive John Radclive was Canada's first professional executioner, placed on the federal payroll as a hangman by a Dominion order-in-council in 1892, on the recommendation of the justice minister
Sir John Thompson. Radclive is often described as having trained under British hangman
William Marwood although there is no documentary proof for this. He can be shown to have hanged at least 69 people in Canada, although his life total was likely much higher. At his death, the
Toronto Telegram said he had 150 executions. He died of alcohol-related illness in Toronto on February 26, 1911, at the age of 55.
Arthur Ellis Arthur Ellis was the
pseudonym of
Arthur B. English, a British man who became Canada's official hangman in 1913, after Radclive's death. Ellis worked as a hangman in Canada until the botched execution of Thomasina Sarao in Montreal in 1935, in which she was decapitated. He died in poverty in Montreal in July 1938. The
Arthur Ellis Awards—named after this pseudonym—is an annual literary award presented by the
Crime Writers of Canada. Ellis is featured in the 2009 documentary ''
Hangman's Graveyard''.
Camille Branchaud The executioner who worked as Camille Branchaud, a pseudonym, succeeded Ellis. Branchaud was on the Quebec government payroll as a hangman, and executed people elsewhere in the country on a piecework basis. 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. Branchaud carried out many executions (for which he was not paid) in the postwar period in Canada, such as the double hanging of Leonard Jackson and Steven Suchan of the
Boyd Gang at the Don Jail in 1952, and
Robert Raymond Cook's execution in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, in 1960. == Methods ==