Capital Punishment in Canada - Method

Method

Before travelling to the New World, England and France had experimented with a wide range of different methods of punishment such as burning at the stake, boiling in oil, beheading, pressing to death, and the guillotine, for decades. Using the philosophy that the death penalty must inflict pain upon the offender, the methods of capital punishment tended to be gruesome and violent. Thus, according to the thinking of the time, onlookers would take it upon themselves not to commit the crimes that caused the offender so much agony.

The most common method of execution eventually became hanging. The first method was "hoisting" in which a rope would be thrown over a beam and the convicted person would then be hoisted into the air by others pulling on the rope. The slip knot would then tightly close around the neck until strangulation. A variation of this included the person with a rope around their neck to stand on a cart and then it would be pushed from under them. This led to the development of suspension in which "the drop" caused by jerking something from underneath the offender became the main component of the execution. Executioners experimented with the length of the rope for the drop. They specifically began to discover new ways of causing instant death upon hanging. In 1872, the length of a drop extended to nearly five-feet which dislocated the neck perfectly. Almost one year later, the length of the drop was extended to seven feet.

The majority of offenders put to death by Canadian civilian authorities were executed by the "long drop" technique of hanging developed in the United Kingdom by William Marwood. This method ensured that the prisoner's neck was broken instantly at the end of the drop, resulting in the prisoner dying of asphyxia while unconscious, which was considered more humane than the slow death by strangulation which often resulted from the previous "short drop" method. The short drop sometimes gave a period of suffering before death finally took place.

Early in his career, John Radclive persuaded several sheriffs in Ontario and Quebec to let him use an alternative method in which the condemned person was jerked into the air. A gallows of this type was used for the execution of Robert Neil at Toronto's Don Jail on February 29, 1888:

The old plan of a "drop" was discarded for a more merciful machine, by which the prisoner is jerked up from a platform on the ground level by a weight of 280 lbs, which is suspended by an independent rope pending the execution … At the words 'Forgive us our trespasses,' the executioner drove his chisel against the light rope that held the ponderous iron at the other end of the noose, and in an instant the heavy weight fell with a thud, and the pinioned body was jerked into the air and hung dangling between the rough posts of the scaffold.

The hanging of Reginald Birchall in Woodstock, Ont. in November 1890 seems to be the last time a device of this kind was used. Radclive had first been exposed to executions as a Royal Navy seaman helping with shipboard hangings of pirates in the South China Sea, and it is possible he was trying to approximate something similar to hanging a man on a ship's yardarm. After Birchall's hanging, Radclive used the traditional long drop method, as did his successors.

While hanging was a relatively humane method of execution under ideal conditions with an expert executioner, mistakes could happen. Condemned prisoners were decapitated by accident at Headingley Jail in Manitoba and Bordeaux Jail in Montreal, and a prisoner at the Don Jail in Toronto hit the floor of the room below and was strangled by the hangman.

Some Canadian jails - such as those in Toronto, Ontario, Headingley, Manitoba, and Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta - had permanent indoor execution facilities, but more typically offenders were hanged on a scaffold built for the occasion in the jail yard.

Military prisoners sentenced to death under Canadian Military Law were shot by firing squad.