Download or read book Drop Dead written by Lorna Poplak and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2017-07-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Confederation in 1867 until the abolition of the death penalty in 1976, 704 people were hanged in Canada. The book examines how trial, conviction, and punishment operated then, and the relevance of capital punishment today. It profiles notable individuals: victims, murderers, judges, jurors, the wrongfully convicted ... and the hangman.
Download or read book Drop Dead written by Lorna Poplak and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2017-07-29 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shining a light on the dark history of hangings in Canada. Take a journey through notable cases in Canada’s criminal justice history, featuring well-known and some less-well-known figures from the past. You'll meet Arthur Ellis, Canada’s most famous hangman, whose work outfit was a frock coat and striped trousers, often with a flower pinned to his lapel. And you will also encounter other memorable characters, including the man who was hanged twice and the gun-toting bootlegger who was the only woman every executed in Alberta. Drop Dead: A Horrible History of Hanging in Canada illustrates how trial, sentencing, and punishment operated in Canada’s first century, and examines the relevance of capital punishment today. Along the way, learn about the mathematics and physics behind hangings, as well as disturbing facts about bungled executions and wrongful convictions.
Download or read book Double Trap written by John Melady and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2005-09-17 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dozen years before the Black Donnellys were butchered at Lucan, Ontario, another murderous rampage took place a few miles away. On June 6, 1868, three men robbed and killed a rich farmer, his wife, and her unborn child. They concocted an alibi, stuck to it, and almost got off. In fact, two of them did. The third, Nicholas Melady, went to prison and fell in love with a beautiful woman in a nearby cell. There to entrap him, she listened, learned, and led him to the gallows. When he was hanged in Goderich, hundreds watched, but thousands were late for the spectacle. They were bitterly disappointed because they had missed the last public hanging in Canada.
Download or read book The Practice of Execution in Canada written by Ken Leyton-Brown and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2010-04-10 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is easy to forget that the death penalty was an accepted aspect of Canadian culture and criminal justice until 1976. The Practice of Execution in Canada is not about what led some to the gallows and others to escape it. Rather, it examines how the routine rituals and practices of execution can be seen as a crucial social institution. Drawing on hundreds of case files, Ken Leyton-Brown shows that from trial to interment, the practice of execution was constrained by law and tradition. Despite this, however, the institution was not rigid. Criticism and reform pushed executions out of the public eye, and in so doing, stripped them of meaningful ritual and made them more vulnerable to criticism.
Download or read book The Hanging of Ang lique written by Afua Cooper and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New light is shed on the largely misunderstood or ignored history of slavery in Canada through this portrait of slave Marie-Joseph Angelique, who in 1734 was arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for starting a fire that destroyed more than forty Montreal buildings. Simultaneous.
Download or read book Hanging in Canada written by Frank W. Anderson and published by Surrey, B.C. : Frontier Books. This book was released on 1982 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hanging in Canada a Concise History of Capital Punishment in Canada written by Frank W. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Walk Towards the Gallows written by Tom Mitchell and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-02-11 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 5 July 1899 Hilda Blake, a 21-year-old maidservant in Brandon, Manitoba, who had come to Canada from England ten years earlier as an orphan immigrant, shot and killed her mistress. Two days after Christmas she was hanged, one of the few women in Canadian history to die for her crime. Blake unintentionally left a remarkable documentary record, ranging from Poorhouse records, courts dockets of custody and criminal cases in which she was the central figure, popular, journalistic, and professional assessments of her character, and a poem, 'My Downfall', that she penned in Brandon Gaol while awaiting execution. To explain why Hilda bought a gun and why she fired it, Kramer and Mitchell employee both historical and literary techniques. The result is a richly textured story of late Victorian social, cultural, and political life. This remarkable book - part mystery, part historical detective story - uncovers Hilda Blake's life, from her origins in Norfolk, England, to her tragic death. It also examines the lives of other principals in the story: successful Brandon businessman Robert Lane and his wife Mary, the murdered woman; Lane's business partner, Alexander McIlvride; Police Chief James Kircaldy; A.P. Stewart and his wife, Letitia Singer Stewart, the family for whom the 12-year-old orphaned Hilda first worked as a domestic servant; Rev. C.C. McLaurin, the Baptist minister who knew Hilda and counselled the condemned woman in her final days; social purity activist Dr Amelia Yeomans, who petitioned for clemency; Governor-General Minto, who urged the Laurier government to stay the execution, even Clifford Sifton, the MP from Brandon, federal minister of Immigration, and the most powerful western Liberal in the Laurier cabinet, for whom the case was a potential minefield. As the authors write, 'We tell a story because only a story can expose the real workings of a culture, and only a story can express our protest against time.'
Download or read book The Lynching of Louie Sam written by Elizabeth Stewart and published by Annick Press. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1882 and 1968 there were 4,742 lynchings in the United States. In Canada during the same period there was one—the hanging of American Indian Louie Sam. The year is 1884, and 15-year-old George Gillies lives in the Washington Territory, near the border with British Columbia. In this newly settled land, white immigrants have an uneasy relationship with the Native Indians. When George and his siblings discover the murdered body of a local white man, suspicion immediately falls on a young Indian named Louie Sam. George and his best friend, Pete, follow a lynch mob north into Canada, where the terrified boy is seized and hung. But even before the deed is done, George begins to have doubts. Louie Sam was a boy, only 14—could he really be a vicious murderer? Were the mob leaders motivated by justice, or were they hiding their own guilt? As George uncovers the truth—implicating Pete’s father and other prominent locals—tensions in the town rise, and he must face his own part in the tragedy. But standing up for justice has devastating consequences for George and his family. Inspired by the true story of the lynching, recently acknowledged as a historical injustice by Washington State, this powerful novel offers a stark depiction of historical racism and the harshness of settler life. The story will provoke readers to reflect on the dangers of mob mentality and the importance of speaking up for what’s right.
Download or read book A Hanging Offence written by Don Cummer and published by Scholastic Canada. This book was released on 2015 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sequel to Brothers at War finds best friends Jacob and Eli on opposite sides of the battlefield as the War of 1812 erupts. Jacob and Eli may be blood brothers, but they are on opposite sides in the battle of Queenston Heights during the War of 1812. While Jacob joins John Norton's Mohawk band fighting with the British-Canadian side, Eli fights with the Americans. The Canadians win the day, but the victory comes at a great cost: the death of General Brock. Eli is captured and jailed. Because he swore the oath of allegiance to the Crown before he left Canada, his return with the invaders makes him a traitor. He is charged with high treason -- a hanging offence. Can Jacob save his friend from the gallows?
Download or read book Last Moments written by Dale Brawn and published by Quagmire Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the final execution in 1962, more than 700 men and women were executed by hanging in Canada. Legal scholar Dale Brawn shines a light into a dark corner of Canadian history with dramatic stories of the condemned and their last moments.
Download or read book The Hanging Valley An Inspector Banks Mystery written by Peter Robinson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a faceless body is found in a tranquil valley just south of the village of Swainshead, Chief Inspector Alan Banks soon finds that no one in the village is willing to talk about it, except to say, “Not again.” An unsolved murder from five years before and the unsolved disappearance of a prominent local man’s girlfriend appear to be connected. As Banks delves deeper into the mystery, someone begins to intentionally slow down the investigation. When events take a turn, Inspector Banks must track his killer across the Atlantic and find a way to make a break in the case before time runs out. Fourth in the critically acclaimed Inspector Banks Mystery Series.
Download or read book The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler written by Irene Quenzler Brown and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-30 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon--including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother. Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler's jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago. Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.
Download or read book The Court of Better Fiction written by Debra Komar and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2019-03-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Court of Better Fiction, forensic science reveals that to establish sovereignty over the Arctic people, Canada hanged the only Inuit ever executed. The men were innocent, but the nation’s guilt lives on.
Download or read book The Last to Die written by Robert J. Hoshowsky and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2007-04-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short-listed for the 2008 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Non-Fiction Although they committed separate crimes, Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin met their deaths on the same scaffold at Toronto’s Don Jail on December 11, 1962. They were the last two people executed in Canada, but surprisingly little was known about them until now. This is the first book to uncover the lives and deaths of Turpin, a Canadian criminal, and Lucas, a Detroit gangster. The result of more than five years of research, The Last to Die is based on original interviews, hidden documents, trial transcripts, and newspaper accounts. Featuring crime scene photos and never-before-published documents, this riveting book also reveals the heroic efforts of lawyer Ross MacKay, who defended both men, and Chaplain Cyril Everitt, who remained with them to the end. What actually happened the night of the hangings is shrouded by myth and rumour. This book finally confirms the truth and reveals the gruesome mistake that cost Arthur Lucas not only his life but also his head.
Download or read book The First Forensic Hanging written by Summer Strevens and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘For the sake of decency, gentlemen, don't hang me high.’ This was the last request of modest murderess Mary Blandy, who was hanged for poisoning her father in 1752. Concerned that the young men in the crowd who had thronged to see her execution might look up her skirts as she was ‘turned off’ by the hangman, this last nod to propriety might appear farcical in one who was about to meet her maker. Yet this was just another aspect of a case which attracted so much public attention in its day that some determined spectators even went to the lengths of climbing through the courtroom windows to get a glimpse of Mary while on trial. Indeed her case remained newsworthy for the best part of 1752, for months garnering endless scrutiny and mixed reaction in the popular press. Opinions are certainly still divided on the matter of Mary’s ‘intention’ in the poisoning of her father, and the extent to which her coercive lover, Captain William Cranstoun, was responsible for this murder by proxy. Yet Mary Blandy’s trial was also notable in that it was the first time that detailed medical evidence had been presented in a court of law on a charge of murder by poisoning, and the first time that any court had accepted toxicological evidence in an arsenic poisoning case. The forensic legacy of the acceptance of Dr Anthony Addington’s application of chemistry to a criminal investigation is another compelling aspect of The First Forensic Hanging.
Download or read book Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse written by Sarah Tarlow and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.
