Demonstrators outside the Don Jail in Toronto protest the execution by hanging of two convicted murderers, Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas, on Dec. 11, 1962.
Lorna Poplak is a writer and researcher whose books include Drop Dead: A Horrible History of Hanging in Canada.
At two minutes past midnight on Dec. 11, 1962, while a small band of demonstrators circled outside in the bitter cold with placards protesting in bold black letters that “hanging is also murder” and that “two wrongs do not make a right,” Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas dropped back to back through the gallows trap door in the execution chamber of the Don Jail in Toronto.
Ronald Turpin, 29, was a small-time lawbreaker known to Toronto police. While making his getaway after stealing $632.84 from a fast-food restaurant in Scarborough in February, 1962, Turpin was pulled over by police constable Frederick Nash for bald tires and a broken front headlight. Both men were armed. After a vicious exchange of gunfire, Nash lay dying at the scene. Turpin, who had been wounded, was arrested and charged with murder.
Arthur Lucas, 54, a Black American hoodlum from Detroit, had, according to some of his connections, journeyed to Toronto in November, 1961, to execute fellow gangster Therland Crater, due to testify in the upcoming trial of a drug trafficker in the United States. In the early hours of Nov. 17, Crater and his girlfriend, Carolyn Ann Newman, were found in their rooming house with their throats slashed. Crater had also been shot four times. Lucas, who had visited the couple earlier that very morning, immediately became the prime suspect. He was apprehended in Detroit and extradited to Canada, where he was tried for the murder of Crater.
Lucas and Turpin were both found guilty and sentenced to death on May 10 and June 13, 1962, respectively.
From the mid-1700s, when Britain imposed its criminal justice system on all of its North American territories, the penalty for murder had been death by hanging. But an uneasy tension has always existed between those in favour of capital punishment and those against.
Among the principal contentions of the pro camp are that capital punishment is the appropriate penalty for odious crimes, and that, if the punishment is severe enough, it will serve as a deterrent. Deterrence, it is argued, works in two ways: Specific deterrence will prevent an offender from reoffending, and general deterrence will discourage others from committing the same crime. (Clearly, specific deterrence has no relevance when the punishment is death – a dead person cannot reoffend.)
Those against capital punishment strongly believe that deterrence does not work. In the early days before the Confederation of Canada in 1867, for example, when the list of capital crimes was long, the prospect of being hanged did not prevent people from committing offences such as stealing a cow or a horse. The death penalty, therefore, can hardly be regarded as a preventive measure. If deterrence is ineffective, it would follow that the principles underlying the death penalty are either retribution (punishment for wrongdoing) or simple biblical-style revenge. Also, what about wrongful conviction and the possibility of executing innocent people? And what if something goes wrong?
The execution of Ronald Turpin went off relatively smoothly: He was dead within minutes. But you would need to look no further than Arthur Lucas for a chilling example of what can go wrong when the penalty is death. His hanging was bungled: He was partially decapitated.
Whether Lucas should have gone to the gallows at all is a moot point. He was described as both dull-witted and ponderous. Would such a man have been capable of carrying out two slayings with the crisp efficiency of a professional assassin? There was scant time or money available to adequately conduct his defence, and his case was based largely on circumstantial evidence. Suspicion that he was wrongfully convicted lingers to this day.
The double hanging in December, 1962, would be the last in Canada, although it would take another 14 years for the death penalty to be abolished for civil, as opposed to military, crimes. In a free vote in July, 1976, Bill C-84 squeaked through the House of Commons with the narrowest of margins: 131 voted for the abolition of capital punishment and 124 against. In 1998, Canada became a fully abolitionist country when all references to capital punishment were removed from the National Defence Act.
And yet.
It was political will rather than public opinion that brought about the end of capital punishment in Canada, and the issue never seems to go away. In 2013, for example, an Angus Reid poll asked: “All things considered, would you support or oppose reinstating the death penalty for murder in Canada?” Sixty-three per cent of respondents voted for the restoration of the death penalty against 30 per cent who demurred. In a 2022 poll, Research Co. found that 51 per cent of Canadians were in favour of reinstating the death penalty, with 37 per cent opposed and 12 per cent undecided.
It is extremely unlikely that this fractious issue will be revisited in the current political climate. There is no predicting the future, though: In an age of populism, anything would be possible. However, the death penalty was a blot on the social and political life of this country. It should never be reinstated. Murder, granted, is a heinous crime, and it merits an appropriate punishment. But, to quote Albert Camus, “capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated, can be compared.”