On March 10, 1960, Ernest Côté was hanged at the Bordeaux prison in Montreal. Two years later, it was the turn of Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin to suffer the same fate in a Toronto prison. They were the last prisoners to be executed by the hand of Canadian justice.
It was not so long ago that governments took the lives of citizens who committed serious crimes. For example, until the 1970s, the French state still guillotined its compatriots who were condemned by the courts. What can we also say about the firing squad in China or even the death penalty by lethal injection, electrification or the gas chamber of the American government?
In our country, we have long thought that hanging was the best technique for a quick death and, above all, without too much suffering.
The two doors of the scaffold of the Bordeaux prison in Montreal. On the last day before his hanging, the prisoner received a last meal and attended a mass. Shortly after midnight, he was brought to the balcony, a handful of people watched his execution, including doctors, a coroner, the prison chaplain, a nurse and sometimes journalists. When death was confirmed, the tocsin was sounded 8 times for men and 10 times for a woman.
Excerpt from the documentary A century under surveillance: the centenary of the Bordeaux prison
IN NEW FRANCE
The first execution by hanging in the French colonial period dates back to the year of the founding of Quebec in 1608. Jean Duval was hanged for leading a plot to assassinate Samuel de Champlain.
Between 1608 and 1867, judicial authorities were in the habit of imposing punishments in public, both for small crimes and for more serious ones. This demonstration of violence in front of everyone served to make people fear the hand of justice. In New France, ordinary people were generally put to death by hanging. For nobles, it was often decapitation, but very few of them suffered this extreme punishment. In addition to these brutal penalties, the accused could be condemned to the stake or to the wheel. Imagine. In this type of execution, the executioner broke the limbs of the condemned who was quartered on a large wooden wheel, exposed to everyone’s view until he died at the end of his strength.
Police forces and penitentiary staff are in favor of the death penalty.
Montreal detention archives
Capital punishment was imposed in New France to punish murder, making counterfeit notes, several types of theft, dueling, arson, rape, attack on reputation, desertion, treason, bestiality and homosexuality. Between 1663 and 1760, it is believed that just over 80 people were executed at the hand of an executioner. The first executioner in our history whose name is known was Jacques Daigre.
BEFORE THE CANADIAN CONFEDERATION OF 1867
Before 1859, British laws set the framework for what was criminal in British North America. In 1865, only murder, rape and treason were considered capital crimes. In the middle of the 19e century, hundreds of offenses could lead to the death penalty. Obvious crimes for us, in 2024, but other surprising ones, like the theft of turnips which led the culprits to the scaffold.
Demonstration against capital punishment in Montreal in 1965.
Radio-Canada Archives
THE LAST YEARS OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN CANADA
In 1967, the murder of a police officer or prison employee, piracy or treason were punishable by death in Canada. The hanging of Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin and the agony lasting nearly 15 minutes which followed had sparked an avalanche of anti-cruelty denunciations in 1962. Especially since the evidence of guilt of the two men had not been very convincing.
Moreover, the movement against the death penalty had been making itself heard in the country for a good fifty years. In 1914, federal MP Robert Bickerdike presented a bill to abolish this sentence, without receiving much attention from the Conservative government of Robert Borden.
It was not until 1976 that the death penalty was abolished by a very close vote in the House of Commons in Ottawa. In fact, there had not been a hanging in the country since 1962. The abolition, however, did not concern Canadian Armed Forces soldiers convicted of cowardice, desertion, illegal surrender or espionage.
Members of the Armed Forces were not relieved of this punishment until 1998. On that day, only 26 years ago, Canada entered the camp of the abolitionists of capital punishment, then replaced by imprisonment perpetuity.
Bordeaux Prison
BAnQ
