History of Capital Punishment in Canada.
"In Canada, the death penalty has been rejected as an acceptable element of criminal justice. Capital punishment engages the underlying values of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It is final and irreversible. Its imposition has been described as arbitrary and its deterrent value has been doubted." Supreme Court of Canada.
Prior to 1961, any person convicted of murder in Canada could be given the death penalty and executed. . However, the Governor General had the power to change the sentence from death to life imprisonment if he wished. The offence of murder was divided into two subcategories: capital murder and non-capital murder. Capital murder was defined as planned and deliberate murder of a police officer or corrections officer while they were on duty. .
One of the earliest accounts of capital punishment was in 1749 when Peter Carteel, a sailor aboard the ship Beaufort in Halifax harbor, ran wild with a knife and killed the boatswain's mate. The case was brought before the Captain's Court. He was found guilty, sentenced to death. The earliest trials and death sentences of our nation took place on ships that lay off our eastern or western coastlines. Any official details, such as name, place and date of the execution, were not recorded. It was not until Canada became a Dominion on July 1, 1867, with its own Department of Justice, that any systematic effort was made to accurately record details of the executions. The first execution to gain national attention was the hanging of Patrick Whelan in Ottawa on February 11, 1869. Whelan had been charged and convicted for the first political assassination to occur in this country. The assassination was of Thomas D'Arcy McGee. The country reacted with so much horror to the murder that 5,000 people attended Whelan's execution. The last two people who were executed in Canada were Robert Turpin and Arthur Lucas on December 10, 1962.
