, the first person formally executed in New Zealand At the time of the
Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 when New Zealand became a British colony, the most current legislation governing capital punishment in
England, and henceforth New Zealand, was the
Punishment of Offences Act (1837), which had abolished the
death penalty for a number of statutory offences, including cattle stealing, and replaced it with
penal transportation for life. However, some capital crimes remained on the British law books, including
murder,
treason,
espionage,
arson in the
royal dockyards, and
piracy with violence. All bar one were men; the exception being
Minnie Dean, who was found guilty of
infanticide in 1895. However, before Dean's trial, imprisonment and execution, several other women had been found guilty of
Infanticide in nineteenth-century New Zealand, but had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment. These were
Caroline Whitting (1872),
Phoebe Veitch (1883) and
Sarah-Jane and Anna Flannagan (1891).
Public executions The first eight executions were carried out in public, from 1842 to 1858; five outside the gate of the Auckland Gaol on the corner of Queen Street and Victoria Street West in central Auckland; one on King Edward Parade on the waterfront at
Devonport; and two outside Mount Cook Gaol in Wellington, which is today the site of the
Dominion Museum building and
National War Memorial on Puke Ahu. At the first execution, on 7 March 1842, approximately a thousand people gathered at the corner of
Queen Street and Victoria Street West, now the centre of the
Auckland CBD, to witness the hanging of
Wiremu Kīngi Maketū. He had been found guilty of murdering five people on
Motuarohia Island, in the
Bay of Islands. of
Minnie Dean. On 12 August 1895, Dean was hanged at Invercargill Gaol after being found guilty of infanticide, becoming the only woman ever to have been executed in New Zealand. The second execution in New Zealand was the public hanging of
Joseph Burns on 17 June 1848. On the day of his execution, he was paraded down Auckland's Queen St, seated in a coffin, and taken by boat across the
Waitemata Harbour to the
Devonport waterfront, where he was hanged on King Edward Parade, not far from the scene of his crimes. Burns was the first European settler to be executed in New Zealand. The third execution in New Zealand, and first in
Wellington, occurred on 19 April 1849. Maroro of Ngāti Kahungunu descent was hanged outside Mount Cook Gaol in front of approximately 500 people, following his conviction of the murder of John Branks and his three children. The fourth execution occurred in the same location in Wellington on 17 June 1850, in front of a similar sized crowd, when William Good was hanged for the murder of John Ellis. The fifth execution was that of escaped
Australian convict, William Bowden, on 27 April 1852. He was hanged on the scaffold erected outside the entrance gate of the Auckland Gaol, on the corner of Queen Street and Victoria Street West, in front of approximately 300 people. The sixth execution in New Zealand, and the third public hanging to take place outside the Auckland Gaol on the corner of Queen and Victoria Streets was that of Charles Marsden on 12 February 1856. It took approximately 14 minutes for Marsden to die, with accusations that his execution was "clumsily performed". The last public execution was that of John Killey, who had been found guilty of murdering John Butler in
Whangārei on 17 December 1857. At his later sentencing in Auckland, the judge,
Sir George Alfred Arney, was "said to have been moved to tears" in passing sentence, while Killey "fell down in the dock in a fainting fit". He was hanged on 18 March 1858, also outside the gate of the Auckland Gaol.
Move to abolish public executions in the British colonies of Australasia Throughout the British colonies of
Australasia public hangings came to be seen as "barbarous spectacles". The last public hanging in
Sydney took place outside
Darlinghurst Gaol on 21 September 1852, in which local press noted disapprovingly the "extraordinary attendance of children, upon whose tender minds the shocking spectacle of a fellow creature dangling at the end of a rope, had no other more serious effect than that of eliciting from them three cheers for the hangman".
New South Wales, where public executions were also "associated with the hated convict era", became the first of the British colonies in Australia to abolish public executions, when the Act to Regulate the Execution of Criminals 1855 (NSW) came into force on 10 January 1855. When the
Moreton Bay settlement separated from NSW to become the self-governing colony of
Queensland in 1859, the New South Wales legislation automatically applied. The Act came into force on 3 June 1858, three months after the country's last public hanging in central Auckland. By way of comparison with other English-speaking countries which share an historical legacy of English common law, the last public execution in the United Kingdom was the hanging of
Michael Barrett outside
Newgate Prison in
London on 26 May 1868, in front of a crowd of approximately 2000 people. Canada's last public execution occurred on 7 December 1869 when
Nicholas Melady was hanged in front of "a few hundred spectators", outside the Huron County Gaol, now called the
Huron Historic Gaol, in
Goderich, Ontario. The last judicial execution carried out in public in the
United States was the hanging of
Rainey Bethea in a parking lot in
Owensboro, Kentucky on 14 August 1936, in front of an estimated crowd of 20,000.
Executed out of public view In 1862, in Wellington, James Collins became the first person in New Zealand to be executed out of public view. In 1866, the site of the old Auckland Gaol was made ready for a temporary market. The Sheriff approved the removal of the graves of the five executed criminals, to respect "public decency". The bodies were reinterred in "a remote and unused spot" of the
Symonds St Cemetery. The last person to be executed was
Walter James Bolton, for poisoning his wife, on 18 February 1957. ==Abolition: 1949–1961==