Daniel Perry Sampson's mugshot in his capital punishment case file. He was the last person to be hanged in Halifax.Library and Archives Canada, e011431917
In 1935, shortly after midnight at a jail behind the old courthouse in Halifax, Daniel Perry Sampson was executed by hanging.
Mr. Sampson’s death was the culmination of a sensational murder case. The middle-aged Black labourer had been charged with the killing of two white boys in 1933. There was a deluge of local outcry and national attention: “Stabbing of Boys Alleged Confessed by Halifax Negro” read The Globe’s front-page headline late that year.
Multiple trials followed and he was convicted in late 1934. An appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada failed in early 1935. Mr. Sampson, a man who had fought for his country during the First World War in France, was hanged two weeks later.
Now, nearly a century after Mr. Sampson was executed, he may be posthumously exonerated. It is the result of one lawyer’s years-long quest and heralds redemption for a family that wants their forebear’s name finally cleared.
A wrongful conviction application was filed to federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser earlier this year. It is a tome of 1,138 pages, replete with archival records and reams of fresh evidence.
There are allegations of a forged and fraudulent confession, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and an illegitimate jury system that excluded Black Haligonians. The application chronicles evidence from an old police file that aims to prove officers misled the courts with perjurious testimony. The same file is said to show the Crown withheld evidence – including a witness who could have attested to Mr. Sampson’s innocence.
In an open letter to Mr. Fraser published on Thursday, the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute wrote: “The gravity of these findings makes this an urgent matter of public interest – one that validates the long-standing experiences and historical injustices carried by the African Nova Scotian community.”
The institute’s submission was part of a volley of open letters published Thursday calling on Mr. Fraser to send Mr. Sampson’s case to the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal for a new legal review.
“Daniel Sampson was innocent,” states a letter from 40 faculty members at Dalhousie University’s law school. They compare the volume of fresh evidence in Mr. Sampson’s case with a few findings that have propelled other files forward.
“The injustice must be expunged,” George Elliott Clarke declares in his letter to the Justice Minister. The celebrated poet and University of Toronto professor has written about Mr. Sampson – a poem entitled 1933 was included in his 2009 collection Execution Poems – and in his letter Prof. Clarke evokes the lasting shadow on Mr. Sampson’s survivors and descendants: “unmerited guilt and humiliation for the reckless and racist apportioning of blame” in the deaths of the boys.
Back in the summer of 1933, in the depths of the Depression, a father found his sons dead one evening near the railway tracks by First Chain Lake in Halifax. The Heffernan boys, 10-year-old Edward and 12-year-old Bramwell, had been out picking blueberries. The initial front-page news reported the deaths as the likely result of being hit by a train. But talk of something darker percolated. Newspapers offered rewards for information leading to an arrest.
New wrongful conviction review body could see hundreds of applications
Five months later, Mr. Sampson purportedly confessed to police and signed a written confession, evidence that effectively served as his death warrant.
Believed by the police to be illiterate, Mr. Sampson’s confession was signed by an X.
That X, eventually, marked the decisive turn toward potential exoneration.
David Steeves first heard of Mr. Sampson’s story through Prof. Clarke. The two met at a poetry reading before Mr. Steeves started law school at Dalhousie in 2000. They formed a bond and thereafter Prof. Clarke recounted the story of Mr. Sampson and suggested the execution may have been the hanging of an innocent man.
Mr. Steeves published a detailed paper on Mr. Sampson in 2010. In 2023, Lance Sampson, a great-great-grandson of Daniel Sampson, reached out to Mr. Steeves. The legal basis of a wrongful conviction started to emerge. Searching through genealogical records, Mr. Steeves uncovered Daniel Sampson’s marriage certificate. It featured his full cursive signature.
It was discovered Mr. Sampson had learned some writing and reading during the First World War. He had previously signed a 1916 document with four Xs. A forensic document analysis this year concluded that it is probable Mr. Sampson did not write the X on the murder confession.
“Daniel Sampson’s case represents a profound miscarriage of justice,” Mr. Steeves said of his quarter-century legal odyssey.
Mr. Sampson was the last person hanged in Halifax and is among the 710 people executed in Canada from Confederation to 1962. Parliament abolished the death penalty in 1976. The United States, as a contrast, has executed more than 1,000 people this century.
The application to exonerate Mr. Sampson was filed in March 7, on the same day he was hanged 90 years earlier.
Lance Sampson posted a picture on social media of his great-great-grandfather’s 1933 mugshot. “Wrongfully convicted, and wrongfully executed,” wrote Lance Sampson. “I am happy to honour my ancestors in this way.”