Capital Punishment in Canada - History

History

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 Canada. However, 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 forever lost owing to fires, floods, or decay.

In early years, offences such as treason, theft, burglary, rape, pedophilia, homosexuality, and unusual sexual practices like bestiality were considered punishable by death. Authority steadily increased the number of offences that were punishable by death in order to deter the number of crimes committed. After being hanged, authority often left the body in public, usually covered with tar so that they could preserve them from weather.

After Confederation, a revision of the statutes reduced the number of offences to only three general offences that were punishable by death: murder, rape, and treason. The only case since Confederation in which the offender received the death penalty for an offence other than murder was the Métis leader, Louis Riel. He was convicted of high treason for his participation in the North-West Rebellion. In 1868, Parliament also stated that the location of the execution was to be within the confines of the prison, as opposed to the public hangings in the past. As a result, by the 1870s, the jails had begun to build the gallows five feet from the ground with a pit underneath instead of the previous high scaffold, built level with the prison wall.

In 1950, an attempt was made to abolish capital punishment. Mr. W. 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. However, Thatcher later withdrew it for fear of Bill No. 2 not generating positive discussion and further harming the chances of abolishment. 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

In 1961, legislation was introduced to reclassify murder into capital or non-capital offences. A capital murder involved a planned or deliberate murder, murder during violent crimes, or the murder of a police officer or prison guard. Only capital murder carried the death sentence.

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, the de facto abolition of the death penalty in Canada occurred in 1963, with legal abolition a formality. 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 de jure abolition of the death penalty, except for certain offences under the National Defence Act. These were removed in 1998.

First-degree murder, which before abolition was the offence of capital murder, now carries a mandatory life sentence without eligibility for parole until the person has served 25 years of the sentence.