of Justice handwritten memorandum about Sophie Boisclair’s status prior to her release from the Kingston Penitentiary in 1887. It describes her as having been of unsound mind for a number of years.
Sophie Boisclair was described by a surgeon as “of unsound mind” when she was finally released into the care of her son in 1887. Time has fogged so many details of these early cases, but how tempting it is to speculate that this was the same child whose birth had rescued her from the gallows in 1867.
Ethan “Saxey” Allen was an ex-convict originally from Detroit, Michigan. The Detroit Post described him as “a hard character … always found with bad associates” and “rather notorious as a rough and a gambler.” He became the leader of a four-man gang that robbed banks and plundered businesses along the Canadian shore of Lake Ontario, always one step ahead of the frustrated police.
The Allen Gang’s luck ran out in the early hours of September 22, 1867; so did that of Cornelius Driscoll. Driscoll, employed for twenty-four years at the Morton Brewery and Distillery in Kingston, Ontario, had started working as their night watchman just two weeks previously.
The gang broke into Morton’s with sledgehammers and crowbars in search of $2,500, which they knew was locked away in the safe. When Driscoll came to investigate the noise, Allen killed him with a sledgehammer. Early the following morning, a local resident found the dead man lying in the distillery yard, and the hunt was on. The gang members fled with their loot, but they were tracked down and arrested in a hotel in Watertown, New York.
The criminals were brought back to Kingston and tried at the Frontenac County Court House. Allen was convicted of murder, although the jury added a recommendation for mercy. The judge did not share the jurors’ merciful sentiments, informing Allen that he held out no hope for pardon. Two of Allen’s accomplices got nine- and ten-year sentences in the Kingston Penitentiary for manslaughter.
The Detroit Post said at the time that the murder “was one of the most cold blooded and brutal affairs of the kind on record,” but it does look as though Allen had a change of heart before he went to the gallows at the Frontenac County Gaol behind the courthouse on December 11. Asked by the sheriff if he had anything to say, he replied: “No, nothing at all. Only I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.” He refused to have the customary black hood (called a “cap”) pulled over his head and, as the hangman pulled the bolt, he said “Lord, have mercy on me,” before dropping to his death.
Legend tells of a ghost that stalked the Morton Brewery and Distillery for many years thereafter. The spirit of Cornelius Driscoll, the watchman who was bludgeoned to death on that September night in 1867, continued to patrol the hallways, checking all the locks.
On November 5, 1867, the citizens of Kingston submitted a petition requesting that Ethan Allen’s death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment. The petition was denied. On December 11, Allen was hanged at the Frontenac County Gaol.
Dominion Day, July 1, 1868 — a special holiday declared by Governor General Lord Monck to celebrate Canada’s first birthday. Just imagine everyone’s excitement when the day finally dawned. There were picnics and parades and speeches and twenty-one-gun salutes and splendid bonfires and even torchlight processions after dark.
The city of St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, came up with a very odd way to celebrate this momentous anniversary: to wit, Canada’s third public hanging. A crowd of about eight thousand men, women, and children gathered around a scaffold set up in front of the jail. Onlookers gasped with horror and pity and women fainted as the condemned man, Joseph Ruel, was half carried, half dragged to the scaffold.
He took seventeen minutes to die.
The Montreal Gazette said the next day that “the execution naturally threw all St-Hyacinthe into sadness, and was a damper to all enjoyment of the national holiday.”
As with Modiste Villebrun, love was the undoing of Joseph Ruel.
He was having a passionate and rather public affair with Arzalie Messier, the wife of a farmer named Toussaint Boulet: witnesses at Ruel’s trial claimed to have seen the couple embracing and grappling on several occasions. Under the pretense of helping Boulet with his treatment for what seems to have been a sexually transmitted disease (probably syphilis), Ruel started to feed the farmer a cocktail of poisons. Ruel made the mistake of obtaining these substances (arsenic and strychnine) from local doctors, ostensibly to deal with pesky dogs and foxes. As Ruel had not professed any previous interest in trapping foxes, the authorities became suspicious when Boulet died. The police concluded that he had been poisoned and Ruel was charged with murder.
Arzalie Messier was not charged. As noted by historian Ken Leyton-Brown in The Practice of Execution in Canada , this may have reflected the community’s sympathy toward a woman who had been wronged by her husband. Toussaint Boulet’s disease was seen as proof that he was a sinner who had destroyed his marriage. He had been unfaithful to his wife for a long period, and his risky sexual behaviour endangered her life as well as his own.
But the courts would not tolerate murder. Ruel had poisoned Boulet. The jury found him guilty, with no recommendation of mercy. In sentencing Ruel, the judge criticized him sharply for robbing the victim of both his wife and his life. Ruel was hanged less than two months later.
Remember Saxey Allen’s words as he went to the gallows? “I hope that my fate will be a warning to others.”
That is exactly what the lawmakers and politicians and medical professionals and large numbers of the general public wanted to hear. They hoped — no, believed — that the fear and horror of a death by hanging would deter others from committing heinous crimes.
This deterrent effect worked in two ways, they argued. First, if the punishment were severe enough, it would discourage criminals from perpetrating further monstrous acts. In legal terms, this is referred to as “specific deterrence” and is not really relevant to the capital punishment debate. After all, dead men commit no crimes. Second and more important is the idea of “general deterrence.” This view holds that potential murderers would think twice — or many times — before copying the behaviour of a hanged criminal. And if, after all that, you did go ahead and murder someone — well, then, it was all your own fault if you found yourself hanging by your neck from the gallows.
But there were other lawmakers, politicians, medical professionals, and members of the public who questioned that view. Before Confederation, the prospect of being hanged hadn’t prevented people from committing even minor offences like stealing a cow or a horse, so how could the death penalty be regarded as effective at all?
Once the deterrent effect of hanging came into doubt, other uncomfortable questions arose. Was the only principle underlying capital punishment that of retribution — punishment for wrongdoing — or, even more unsettling, simple biblical-style revenge: “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”? Some claimed that the punishment should fit the crime, and that the execution of murderers was justified, especially when the victim was a policeman or a prison guard, the true protectors of our society. Others, like the late, great Canadian defence lawyer Edward Greenspan, argued that “the real reason why this barbarous practice persists in a so-called civilized world is that people still hold the primitive belief that the taking of one human life can be atoned for by taking another.”
The naysayers pointed to other problems, too. People might go to the gallows simply because they had a tough prosecutor or an inadequate defence lawyer — if they had one at all. This was very clearly illustrated in the case of Elizabeth Workman of Mooretown, Ontario, who was arrested for murdering her husband, James, in October 1872. Scott M. Gaffield notes in “Justice
