61 Years Ago - Canada’s Last Executions
Botched and with questions still on the guilt of one of the condemned, Canada carried out her last ever legal executions on a cold night in Toronto’s Don Jail on 11 December 1962.
“Some consolation!”
Ronald Turpin, on being told that he may be one of the last men hanged in Canada. (Hoshowsky, p.174)
Back to back they made their final stand on the trap door as nooses were fitted about their necks. The executioner had attempted to ensure a ‘quick’ death in the usual way: making distant observations of the condemned to estimate how much rope each needed to drop to effectively break their neck. The “Long Drop” method (still used today in most of the countries that continue to execute) was not a perfect science and getting it wrong would happen. The Long Drop was intended to avoid the slow strangulation caused by a “Short Drop” or hoisted execution (some countries today, like Iran, continue to deliberately kill the condemned by strangulation via short-drop or hoisted hanging.
The double hangings of Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas at Toronto’s Don Jail, now buried at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, would be Canada’s last. It would also be one of the more gruesome.
Arthur Lucas, convicted of a double murder despite some doubts on his guilt, was dropped so far that he was nearly decapitated. In the book “The Last to Die” by Robert Hoshowsky, the scene is described, quoting an interview with Salvation Army Chaplain Cyril Everitt:
“The hanging was bungled. Turpin died clean, but Lucas’ head was torn right off. It was hanging just by the sinews of the neck. There was blood all over the floor.” (Hoshowsky, p.180)
However another witness, Toronto homicide detective Jim Crawford gave a more gruesome description:
“Inside the jail, all was quiet, except for the gallows area, where the gruesome spectacle of the double hangings was far from over.
‘Everybody was taken aback by the spray of blood, a horrendous display of blood that was literally like a water pipe had burst, and the walls were sprayed with blood.’”
(Hoshowsky, p.181)
Canada considered different methods of execution until abolishing the death penalty for murder in 1976 (and eventually abolishing it completely in 1998). With the exception of military executions, which were done by shooting, all of Canada’s executions were carried out by some form of hanging. Nearly all involved the Long Drop and a few in the 19th Century using an experimental gallows developed by executioner John Radclive. This used a counterweight that would drop and rapidly ‘jerk’ and hoist the condemned. The claimed intention was to avoid the terror for the condemned of having to climb a set of stairs in the minutes before their own hanging. Unfortunately this process did not go to plan and the gallows were quickly abandoned for the traditional long drop.
These botched executions highlight the cruelty of execution. The trauma inflicted on the body will always be a form of torture at execution and the trauma inflicted on the mind of the condemned as they wait to be killed by the state, is also very clearly torture.
The United States has not been shy to experiment, cruelly, with new ways to execute. Hanging, shooting, gassing and lethal injection have all been used and have all been botched. Resulting in extreme suffering of the condemned and psychological trauma for all of the survivors who witness executions.
Lethal Injection is believed to be one of the most frequently botched methods of execution. This is complicated by the fact that many lethal injections involve a paralytic that will, if effective, mask the suffering of the condemned as painful drugs are injected and as their lungs cease to function.
There is no method of execution that cannot be botched. There is no method of execution or condition on death row that will undo the psychological torture of being on death row.
More than half of the world’s countries have abolished the death penalty in law. More than two thirds of the world have stopped using the death penalty. Only a small number of countries are known to execute every year. One of those countries is the United States where, despite the gross expense of the death penalty, the inability of the death penalty to deter and even the inability to obtain their original recipe of death from drugs manufacturers, states within the USA and the federal government (which rarely executes, but went on an unparalleled execution spree in the waning days of the Trump administration), have been actively seeking new ways to kill. To ‘tinker with the machinery of death’ as former Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun so memorably put it in 1994. Untested methods of execution continue to be used on prisoners, such as the use of different drugs, like midazolam, resulting in even greater spectacles of torture.
The State of Alabama is seeking ways to use Nitrogen Gas Asphyxiation to kill prisoners. https://www.reuters.com/legal/alabama-supreme-court-allows-first-us-execution-by-nitrogen-gas-proceed-2023-11-02/ It is feared that one of the first victims of this experiment with death may be Rocky Myers. A man whose case is problematic in so many ways, highlighting so much of what is wrong with the US justice system especially as it relates to the death penalty.
Amnesty International has highlighted Rocky’s case in the year’s Human Rights Day Write-a-Thon selection. If you have not already, you can easily take a moment to ask Kay Ivey, the Governor of Alabama, to use her powers to commute Rocky’s death sentence and avoid committing a great injustice with his execution.
https://amnesty.ca/write-for-rights/rocky-myers/
Rocky Myers, currently on Death Row in Alabama and facing execution, potentially via a yet un-tested method.
See also:
Joint Committee on Capital and Corporal Punishment and Lotteries
https://parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.com_SOCHOC_2201_1_1/1
Execution by lethal injection: A quarter century of state poisoning (Amnesty International, 2007)