Drop Dead
Page 14
But time has not been kind to these institutions, all launched with great fanfare as state-of-the -art architectural wonders based on forward-looking reformist penal principles. All ended up being described as “monstrous relics,” or “black cesspools,” or worse.
Carleton County Gaol has fared the best. It remains a vibrant concern, still accommodating “inmates.” Today, people happily pay to cram themselves into the narrow, uncomfortable cells for the night. You can even take a tour around the facility and walk in Patrick Whelan’s footsteps along the short passage from death row to the execution chamber, where a noose still dangles.
By the 2000s, all that remained of Oakalla was a stone marker and a flight of old stone steps leading nowhere.
The Don building now serves as the administrative centre for the new Bridgepoint Health centre, which opened in 2013. The former latrine that served as the execution chamber is firmly under lock and key. If you do manage to gain access to the room, you’ll see that both the cross beam that supported the rope and the platform and trap door have been removed. The gallows, too, are gone. To the horror of civic leaders, the general public, the City of Toronto’s historical board, and, presumably, some dedicated souvenir hunters, the gallows were secretly dismantled and destroyed on the orders of Ontario Correctional Services Minister Frank Drea in December 1977. But etched into the walls of the chamber are the ghostly grey geometric shapes that still mark the position where the wood and steel structure once stood.
Chapter 16
The End of the Rope
B oth long before Confederation and after, jostling and jeering crowds gathered in their hundreds and even thousands to witness the spectacle of public executions. When Joseph Ruel was hanged at St-Hyacinthe on Dominion Day, 1868, more than eight thousand men, women, and children encircled the scaffold to watch him die. In 1881, a drunk and disorderly mob battered down the fence of the Annapolis County jail to get a really close look at Joseph Thibeau’s last moments. Dozens fought for perches to witness the execution of Reginald Birchall in Woodstock in 1890, and in 1954, a mob of teenagers joked and set off firecrackers when Peter Balcombe met his end in Cornwall.
But the crowd at the piercingly cold corner of Don Jail Roadway and Gerrard Street East in Toronto on the night of December 10, 1962, was different. They were circling to protest the imminent hangings of Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas. There were just fifteen picketers in all, waving signs scrawled with slogans like CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS NO DETERRENT and THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
A small group, to be sure, but a significant token of societal shift.
“I hope to make people aware of the fact that men are dying merely for vengeance,” one woman told a CBC reporter.
The question of capital punishment has always stirred up strong and ambivalent feelings.
Remember farmer and premier Ernest Charles Drury, who spent twenty-five years as the sheriff of Simcoe County?
I am opposed to capital punishment, but not for sentimental reasons — though the one execution which I did witness was, God knows, horrible enough. I do not believe that capital punishment serves the cause of justice. Justice should be impersonal. The death penalty introduces highly emotional elements which judge and jury, being human, cannot disregard. Then too there is always the doubt. Unquestionably, innocent men have been executed, just as guilty men have been set free. Further, there is the effect on the public mind: I cannot forget that eager crowd gathered outside the jail, to peek [at an execution through cracks in a wall], after the late movies.
Would not the cause of justice be better served if the penalty were not death but real life imprisonment, with no reprieve, but with always the opportunity to correct a mistake, if a mistake has been made?
Drury proved himself to be truly human with his own knee-jerk and highly emotional reaction to a face-to-face encounter with the hangman: “Execution was set for shortly before Christmas, and some ten days in advance a man presented himself in my office. He told me his name, but he did not need to. I knew, and the name sent a chill down my spine. I did not shake hands.”
As pointed out by David B. Chandler in Capital Punishment in Canada, the first attempt to abolish the death penalty in Canada dates back to 1914, when Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Robert Bickerdike submitted a private member’s bill to parliament. You could say that Bickerdike was not exactly a fan of capital punishment. To illustrate, here is a selection of his comments made during the debate as published in The Globe in February 1914. “Capital punishment,” he declared, “is a blot on Christianity and a blight on religion.” It did not act as a crime deterrent; it was simply vengeance. “From judge to hangman,” those concerned were guilty of “brutalized, legal murder.” And his opinion on paying the hangman for his services? “Think of a government making a contract at so much per head for sending its fellow citizens into eternity, and giving him a bonus of thirty pieces of silver if he makes a good job of it!”
His passionate arguments had not the slightest effect, and his bill was defeated. Bickerdike was mightily persistent, and he tried again in 1915, 1916, and 1917. Again, no success, although he did provoke some angry pushback from people who, unlike him, believed that the death sentence had to be retained. During one of those parliamentary debates, for example, Minister of Justice Charles Doherty raised the spectre of brutish foreigners to explain a spike in the murder rate: “We are getting flooded with a population who are accustomed to think that you can kill your neighbour but that your life is so sacred that the state will never touch you.”
After a long drought between the two world wars, private member’s bills against capital punishment were again introduced in the early 1950s, and, again, they were defeated. Then in December 1953, Minister of Justice Stuart Garson appointed a special joint committee of the House and Senate to study, weird as the combination sounds, “capital punishment, corporal punishment, and lotteries.” The committee reported back in 1956, with a recommendation to retain the death penalty, except for children younger than eighteen years.
The report went nowhere. It would take extensive political will to push through the abolition of capital punishment, but nobody was sufficiently fired up as yet. As Arthur Maloney, who was a Conservative MP as well as a renowned criminal lawyer, said during a parliamentary debate in May 1961: “What the people who favour abolition, who sincerely believe in the wisdom of abolition, have to do is to create in the public an awareness of the futility of the penalty of death.”
But in truth it was not just a handful of lonely backbenchers who were interested in bringing about changes to the criminal justice system in mid-twentieth-century Canada. In addition to Maloney, for example, another powerful politician jumped onto the abolitionist bandwagon — Liberal Party leader Lester B. Pearson. To illustrate, this lively 1967 exchange between Pearson (by then prime minister) and a House of Commons “chorus,” as quoted by Joel Kropf in A Matter of Deep Personal Conscience :
Mr. Pearson: I believe the only logical explanation left for retaining capital punishment in our society is a desire for retaliation —
Some hon. Members: No, no.
Mr. Pearson: — and for revenge.
Some hon. Members: No, no.
Mr. Pearson: It is to make the punishment fit the crime.
Some hon. Members: No, no.
Mr. Pearson: The criminal kills, so he must be killed.
Some hon. Members: No, no.
Mr. Pearson: Well, Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe that this is an adequate reason in any society that aspires to become truly civilized.
However, you could hardly find a more passionate opponent of the death sentence than the man who became the thirteenth prime minister of Canada in 1957, Conservative John George Diefenbaker.
Diefenbaker, or Dief, as he was affectionately called, was born in Ontario in 1895, but his family moved west to Saskatchewan in 1903. When he was nine years old, Dief announced to his mother that he was going to be prime minister of Canada when he grew up. She
did not laugh, and he spent the next fifty-plus years prepping himself for the job.
After a stint in the military during the First World War, Dief took the first big step along his chosen career path — he graduated as a lawyer in 1919 and started to practise criminal law. Tall and slim with piercing blue eyes and always impeccably dressed, Dief proved to be a formidable adversary in court. As mentioned by Arthur Slade in John Diefenbaker: An Appointment with Destiny , even hardened RCMP officers wilted under his rapid-pace cross-examinations, booming voice, and pointing, accusatory finger.
In the 1930s, Dief defended six murder cases in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The second of these was forever seared into his brain. His client was Alex Wysochan, a Polish immigrant enmeshed in an affair with a married woman, Antena Kropa. The couple tried to run away together, but Kropa’s husband, Stanley, found them and forced them to return. A short while later, Christmas Day 1929 ushered in a deadly twist to the tale. An altercation between the two men at Kropa’s house ended with the shooting death of Antena. Wysochan, found drunk by her side, was charged with murder and brought to trial in March 1930.
Slade notes that the men had wildly conflicting stories. Kropa, the star witness for the prosecution, claimed that an intoxicated Wysochan broke into their home, threatening to shoot him. Kropa leaped out the window to escape, after which he heard the shots that killed his wife. Wysochan, through a Polish interpreter, testified that Kropa found him drinking at a hotel, invited him to his house, and started a fight. Kropa pulled out a gun and shot his wife when she tried to intercede. Thereupon, Wysochan fell into a drunken stupor.
John Diefenbaker as a new Member of Parliament, May 1940. Diefenbaker was passionately opposed to capital punishment. As prime minister of Canada from 1957 to 1963, he commuted fifty-two of sixty-six death sentences.
Suffering from a gastric ulcer that confined him to bed at times during the trial, Diefenbaker was far below par. But it probably wouldn’t have made much difference even if he had been at the top of his game. The prosecutor referred to Wysochan as a “reptile,” a “rat,” and a “dirty little coward.” The jurymen, all British in origin, were repulsed by this boozy, adulterous foreigner. The judge was hostile, suspecting Wysochan of faking his need for an interpreter. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and despite Diefenbaker’s appeal against the sentence, Wysochan was hanged in Prince Albert on June 20, 1930.
Diefenbaker had this to say in the House of Commons in May 1972:
Some wonder why I have such a feeling of concern over the imposition of the death penalty. I ask those who wonder how would you feel if you defended a man charged with murder, who was as innocent as any hon. member in this House at this very moment, who was convicted; whose appeal was dismissed, who was executed; and six months later the star witness for the Crown admitted that he, himself, had committed the murder and blamed it on the accused? That experience will never be effaced from my memory.
During his term as prime minister of Canada, from 1957 to 1963, Diefenbaker commuted fifty-two of sixty-six death sentences. One of these commutations, and possibly the most significant, was that of fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott in 1960. Initially the public was exceptionally antagonistic toward Truscott, who was branded a juvenile monster. After all, they insisted, he wouldn’t have been convicted unless he was guilty. Still, the optics of a boy languishing on death row were not good.
In 1961, legislation was passed to reclassify murder into two categories. Capital murder was defined as planned or intentional murder, murder that occurred during another violent crime, or the murder of an on-duty police or correctional officer. Only this type of murder would warrant the death sentence. All other murder was classified as non-capital.
Another game changer in the 1950s and 1960s was the pioneering role played by investigative journalists, a new breed of feisty reporters who made it their business to probe cases for the possibility of wrongful convictions. John Edward Belliveau and Jacques Hébert both wrote books challenging the conviction and execution of Wilbert Coffin for the 1953 slaying of bear hunter Richard Lindsey in Quebec. In her comprehensive series of articles published in the Globe and Mail in 1963 (called “MURDER?”), Betty Lee presented a damning exposé of the case against Arthur Lucas, recently hanged in Toronto. And Isabel LeBourdais meticulously investigated the Truscott case. Her book, which came out in 1966, turned the tide of public opinion in Truscott’s favour, although it would take him another forty-one years to be finally acquitted.
Diefenbaker’s Conservative government fell in 1963, and the Liberals took control. Under Pearson’s leadership, the new government came out staunchly against capital punishment. Not another hanging took place, and, over the next five years, a total of forty-four death sentences were commuted.
Public reaction was mixed. In a 1966 CBC television broadcast, one interviewee said that “if a person takes a life, I think that their life should be taken in return.” Another disagreed: “They shouldn’t hang people at all.”
But generally, the position of the public in the 1960s was firmly in favour of retaining capital punishment. As Chandler points out, “In the mid-60’s, there was stable approval of the death penalty at between 50 and 58 per cent of Canadians and stable disapproval of it, between 33 and 40 per cent. A period of instability in the late 60’s seemed to generate an increase in support of the death penalty to between 60 and 66 per cent of Canadians and a lessening of abolitionist opinion to 27–33 per cent.”
Bucking the trend of majority opinion, the government suspended the death penalty for murder in 1967 for a trial period of five years, except for capital crimes, now redefined as cases where the victim was a police or prison officer killed in the line of duty. In 1973, this moratorium was extended for another five years.
But the history of hanging in Canada had not yet reached its final chapter. The retentionists fought back.
In July 1975, sixty-five hundred prison workers walked off the job. They demanded that capital punishment should be strictly enforced for killers of police and correctional officers. And what exactly would this achieve? “Protection,” barked Paul Gascon of the Public Service Alliance of Canada in a CBC radio interview.
Abolitionist heavyweights shot back. In a CBC television interview that same year, John Diefenbaker said of the death penalty: “It’s too dangerous, and innocent men can be executed and have been executed.”
As the countdown continued to July 14, 1976 — the date when parliament would take a formal vote to retain or abolish the death penalty — there was still no clear indication as to which way the decision would swing. Parliamentarians would have a “free vote,” meaning that they could go with their conscience. One week beforehand, another prominent politician took centre stage with a passionate speech in the House of Commons — the then Liberal prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
“My primary concern here is not compassion for the murderer,” he said. “My concern is for the society which adopts vengeance as an acceptable motive for its collective behaviour. If we make that choice, we will snuff out some of the boundless hope and confidence in ourselves and other people, which has marked our maturing as a free people.”
A murder case that stoked the flames in this heated public debate on capital punishment was that of Montrealer René Vaillancourt, referred to by the Globe and Mail as a “bland loner” and a “cold fish.” He was convicted in September 1973 for the shooting death of Constable Leslie Maitland.
Vaillancourt’s early life had been marked with petty crimes such as shoplifting and auto theft. He was out on bail in February 1973 when he decided to pay a visit to Toronto and rob a bank. As he sped away after the robbery, he was pursued by Maitland and an unarmed police trainee.
“That first cop didn’t want to give me his gun — that is why I shot him,” said Vaillancourt: four times — first in the chest and then in the back as Maitland fell to the ground.
“I chased the other policeman trying to shoot him. He didn’
t have a gun out. I got in the car and shot at him from inside the car.” Trainee Brian McCullum was lucky. Four bullets missed their target.
Retentionists argued that hanging the perpetrator was the only penalty appropriate for such a cold and calculated murder. Abolitionists used the case to support their cause, pointing out that Maitland himself had strongly believed that capital punishment should go for good. At the parliamentary debate on the abolition bill in July 1976, solicitor general and human rights activist Warren Allmand read from a letter by Maitland’s widow pleading for Vaillancourt’s life to be spared.
On July 14, Bill C-84 squeaked through, with 131 for and 124 against abolishing the death penalty for all civilian crimes. Henceforth, the punishment for first-degree (previously capital) murder would be life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years. The one exception was under the National Defence Act , where the death penalty remained in force until 1998. It was never used.
In 1987, a vigorous campaign was launched for the return of capital punishment.
“Bring it back!” urged Conservative MP Mary Collins of British Columbia in a radio interview in April of that year. She told the CBC’s Peter Gzowski that on the basis of a poll and letters received, her constituents were “strongly in favour of restoring capital punishment,” with a ratio of 70 percent for and 30 percent against. Did she believe that capital punishment had a deterrent effect on serious crimes? Well, that was up in the air, but “there are situations which are so horrendous that there seems to be no redeeming value in keeping the criminal in jail for the rest of his or her life.” And in these cases, insisted Collins, there is a sense of justice that the criminal should be put to death.
Veteran Toronto-based defence attorney Edward Greenspan criss-crossed the country to whip up support for the anti-restoration brigade. “There is no scientific evidence that capital punishment stops murders and common sense leads to the same conclusion,” he wrote in the Toronto Star in March 1987. “The largest number of homicides are crimes of passion. Such killings are the result of primal emotions so deep that the fear of death has not the slightest chance of restraining them.… Let us eliminate the death penalty forever from our law, and devote our energy instead to finding real, effective, but humane answers to the problem of crime.”