Meanwhile, Miller and Cockriell took off. The distress call—“A Member is down!”—went out to prowling patrol cars. The fugitives led police on a wild chase for twenty miles, during which the rifle was thrown out of the car. Eventually, they were forced off the road and arrested.
Convicted of a murder punishable by death, Miller and Cockriell were sentenced to hang. Though the death penalty was still law, Canada had not hanged anyone since 1962. The summer of 1976 saw the issue reach a climax on both sides of the border. The United States Supreme Court restored the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia. By coincidence, Canada’s Parliament was to vote on whether to retain the noose on the same day that we were summoned to Ottawa to argue the case of Miller and Cockriell v. The Queen before all nine judges of Canada’s Supreme Court.
Lawyers have a saying: “Hard cases make bad law.” If you have an important issue to argue, you don’t want it riding on a bad set of facts. In the case of Miller and Cockriell, the Crown’s submission was this: The two appellants planned to kill a Mountie; they went looking for one, found one, and killed him. What we were there to do was strike down hanging.
There is a tradition in Canadian law that says, “If you lose a client to the noose, you see him out.” Hangings in British Columbia took place at Oakalla Prison Farm, where the condemned was dropped down an old elevator shaft. Lose Cockriell’s appeal and that’s what I may witness, I thought.
First came a visit to the Department of Justice, where a somber bureaucrat showed us a list of those on death row, and said that if both the vote in Parliament and the outcome of the appeal backed the noose, the government would have no choice but to hang someone. Guess whose names were at the top of the list.
June 22, 1976, was the day. The appeal began with my senior counsel rising to his feet. To the best of my recollection, what followed was an exchange that went something like this:
“My Lord Chief Justice, my lords, this appeal raises the basic issue of whether the state has the right to put its citizens to—”
He was interrupted.
“You call this a factum?” one of the judges barked down from the bench.
It was a complicated issue. Our factum was long. It had appendices.
“I’m sure if your lordship reads it—”
“Read it! I can’t even lift it!”
“My lord, the issue is—”
That’s when the chief justice jumped in.
“Come, come, Counsel. You have no defense. This factum doesn’t conform to our rules.”
There was a pause.
This was not looking good.
And that’s when my partner leaned down to me and said, “Hang on. Those are the liberals I hoped would be with us on this appeal.”
Good God! I thought. We’re here to decide whether to hang two men, and the court’s hung up on the length of our factum!
We were in the thick of it against overwhelming odds when a runner came in with the result of the vote in Parliament. He had two slips of paper. The one for retention of the noose read 133. The one for abolition read 125.
Bang!
Snap!
Thump … thu—
In my mind’s eye, I saw our client hang.
As it turned out, he didn’t die. Yes, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the legality of hanging, but the runner who’d come from Parliament had mixed up the slips, and consequently had reversed the results of the vote.
No matter where you stand on the morality of the death penalty, the undeniable fact remains that human foibles infect fallible courts that make irreversible decisions.
This novel was inspired by that danger.
The province in which Slade resides is bordered by the two states that retain hanging. In January 1993, Washington hanged Westley Allan Dodd, who, incidentally, fought for the right to be executed.
In July 1994, while on a flight to Africa to research Zombie, I was seated beside a Seattleite. At about three in the morning, somewhere over the Congo, we passed time by playing hangman. The puzzle I wanted to pose for him was Westley Allan Dodd, but I didn’t know whether the middle name was spelled Allan, Allen or Alan.
10 Rillington Place is a film about the Christie/Evans case, the travesty that did away with Britain’s noose. Richard Attenborough played Christie; John Hurt played Evans.
I watched that film again as background for this novel. Afterwards, I was sitting in the dark before a hypnotic fire, sipping Scotch as I developed this plot within my mind, and suddenly a primal shiver wormed up my spine.
His wife was killed, his child was killed, and he was framed for their murders; no one believed him when the real psycho became the chief witness against him at his trial, and the entire British legal system fell for Christie’s perjury. Imagine how Timothy Evans must have felt when he met Albert Pierrepoint on the gallows and the hangman put the noose around his neck.
I didn’t need to imagine.
How he felt was this:
Slade
Vancouver, B.C.
Hangman Page 33