Drop Dead. Lorna Poplak

      On November 5, 1867, the citizens of Kingston submitted a petition requesting that Ethan Allen’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. The petition was denied. On December 11, Allen was hanged at the Frontenac County Gaol.

      Dominion Day, July 1, 1868 — a special holiday declared by Governor General Lord Monck to celebrate Canada’s first birthday. Just imagine everyone’s excitement when the day finally dawned. There were picnics and parades and speeches and twenty-one-gun salutes and splendid bonfires and even torchlight processions after dark.

      The city of St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, came up with a very odd way to celebrate this momentous anniversary: to wit, Canada’s third public hanging. A crowd of about eight thousand men, women, and children gathered around a scaffold set up in front of the jail. Onlookers gasped with horror and pity and women fainted as the condemned man, Joseph Ruel, was half carried, half dragged to the scaffold.

      He took seventeen minutes to die.

      The Montreal Gazette said the next day that “the execution naturally threw all St-Hyacinthe into sadness, and was a damper to all enjoyment of the national holiday.”

      As with Modiste Villebrun, love was the undoing of Joseph Ruel.

      He was having a passionate and rather public affair with Arzalie Messier, the wife of a farmer named Toussaint Boulet: witnesses at Ruel’s trial claimed to have seen the couple embracing and grappling on several occasions. Under the pretense of helping Boulet with his treatment for what seems to have been a sexually transmitted disease (probably syphilis), Ruel started to feed the farmer a cocktail of poisons. Ruel made the mistake of obtaining these substances (arsenic and strychnine) from local doctors, ostensibly to deal with pesky dogs and foxes. As Ruel had not professed any previous interest in trapping foxes, the authorities became suspicious when Boulet died. The police concluded that he had been poisoned and Ruel was charged with murder.

      Arzalie Messier was not charged. As noted by historian Ken Leyton-Brown in The Practice of Execution in Canada , this may have reflected the community’s sympathy toward a woman who had been wronged by her husband. Toussaint Boulet’s disease was seen as proof that he was a sinner who had destroyed his marriage. He had been unfaithful to his wife for a long period, and his risky sexual behaviour endangered her life as well as his own.

      But the courts would not tolerate murder. Ruel had poisoned Boulet. The jury found him guilty, with no recommendation of mercy. In sentencing Ruel, the judge criticized him sharply for robbing the victim of both his wife and his life. Ruel was hanged less than two months later.

      Remember Saxey Allen’s words as he went to the gallows? “I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.”

      That is exactly what the lawmakers and politicians and medical professionals and large numbers of the general public wanted to hear. They hoped — no, believed — that the fear and horror of a death by hanging would deter others from committing heinous crimes.

      This deterrent effect worked in two ways, they argued. First, if the punishment were severe enough, it would discourage criminals from perpetrating further monstrous acts. In legal terms, this is referred to as “specific deterrence” and is not really relevant to the capital punishment debate. After all, dead men commit no crimes. Second and more important is the idea of “general deterrence.” This view holds that potential murderers would think twice — or many times — before copying the behaviour of a hanged criminal. And if, after all that, you did go ahead and murder someone — well, then, it was all your own fault if you found yourself hanging by your neck from the gallows.

      But there were other lawmakers, politicians, medical professionals, and members of the public who questioned that view. Before Confederation, the prospect of being hanged hadn’t prevented people from committing even minor offences like stealing a cow or a horse, so how could the death penalty be regarded as effective at all?

      Once the deterrent effect of hanging came into doubt, other uncomfortable questions arose. Was the only principle underlying capital punishment that of retribution — punishment for wrongdoing — or, even more unsettling, simple biblical-style revenge: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Some claimed that the punishment should fit the crime, and that the execution of murderers was justified, especially when the victim was a policeman or a prison guard, the true protectors of our society. Others, like the late, great Canadian defence lawyer Edward Greenspan, argued that “the real reason why this barbarous practice persists in a so-called civilized world is that people still hold the primitive belief that the taking of one human life can be atoned for by taking another.”

      The naysayers pointed to other problems, too. People might go to the gallows simply because they had a tough prosecutor or an inadequate defence lawyer — if they had one at all. This was very clearly illustrated in the case of Elizabeth Workman of Mooretown, Ontario, who was arrested for murdering her husband, James, in October 1872. Scott M. Gaffield notes in “Justice Not Done: The Hanging of Elizabeth Workman” that when Elizabeth’s trial opened on March 20, 1873, it became clear that she had neither a lawyer nor the means to hire one. As a result, the court asked a local barrister, thirty-three-year -old John A. Mackenzie, to handle her case. The trial started the next day, leaving Mackenzie mere hours to familiarize himself with the facts and formulate a defence in this life-and-death battle. All he could come up with was a statement of Elizabeth’s innocence. He neither questioned nor challenged witnesses during the two-day trial, nor did he make reference to the good character of his client or the fact that she was more than likely the victim of spousal brutality. As future prime minister Alexander Mackenzie (no relative of lawyer John A.) argued in a letter in May 1873, “there was no opportunity of bringing out evidence that might tilt in her favour. The unfortunate woman had no counsel engaged, and no one interested in assisting her.” And as for the counsel who was eventually appointed, “what could he do on a few hours’ notice?”

      There were yet more troubling questions that emerged in the pro- and anti-capital punishment debate. What if something went horribly wrong during the hanging; for example, if it took too long for someone to die, as had happened to Joseph Ruel?

      And, most disturbing of all, what if, by some dreadful mistake, the wrong person went to the gallows?

      Chapter 2

      The Deadly Game of Hangman

      I n March 1902, Stanislaus Lacroix was executed in Hull, Quebec, after murdering his wife and a neighbour. A rare photo shows the condemned man standing on the trap door beneath a gallows. His arms are pinioned with black straps, and a cap is draped over his head. The noose dangles down beside him. Gathered around are four men. Two priests in their cassocks and the sheriff with his cocked hat, gown, and sword stand