The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History by Carolyn Strange (review)

Carolyn Strange has long been an important historian of Canadian crime and punishment. Young women's interaction with the justice system was an aspect of her 1995 book Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City, 1880–1930 (University of Toronto Press). Her 1996 edited collection, Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment, and Discretion (ubc Press), included articles addressing the history of punishment and the exercise of mercy. In two books co-authored with Tina Loo, Strange surveyed the history of moral regulation and then how popular crime magazines portrayed crime, criminality, perpetrators, and victims: Making Good: Law and Moral Regulation in Canada, 1867–1939 (University of Toronto Press, 1997) and True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines (Raincoast Books, 2004). In recent years, her research shifted to non-Canadian subjects. For example, she explored the history of discretionary justice in the United States in Discretionary Justice: Pardon and Parole in New York from the Revolution to the Depression (New York University Press, 2016). With The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History, Strange refocuses her attention on the justice system of Canada and produces the most important work yet published on the history of capital punishment in post-Confederation Canada.

Strange analyzes one subset of capital cases-those related to people convicted of "sex murders" from Confederation until the death sentence was abolished in Canada in 1976. Sex murders were not legally defined, but Strange identifies them as those involving sexual assault or sodomy as well as murders motivated, "in the eyes of contemporaries, by perverted sexual desires or attempted assaults of a sexual nature" (6). The sixty-one cases that Strange considers represent only a small sample of the almost fifteen hundred people sentenced to death after Confederation. Strange, however, argues that sex murders were particularly important because they tended to attract considerable media attention and spurred intense emotional responses that even affected how Cabinet decided whether to commute death sentences. Strange notes that sex murders "violated moral norms and threatened the social order; they set communities clamouring for the identification and capture of the culprit. Anger and grief, amplified through the press, pressured police and prosecutors to ensure swift and severe punishment" (6). Sex murders also played an oversized role in the debate about whether to abolish the death penalty. Strange's attention to the emotions that swirled around sex murders reflects the recent historiographical interest in the history of emotions.

The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History is divided into an introductory chapter, followed by five chapters organized chronologically. An epilogue then considers post-abolition debates about capital punishment. In each chapter, Strange discusses key developments that affected perceptions of criminals and the employment of the death penalty (such as law reform initiatives, interest group advocacy, changes in criminological theory, and shifts in the psychiatric understandings of harmful sexual desires). Included too are short case studies (usually two or three pages long) that are often powerful and disturbing because of the extreme violence of some of the crimes and for how they shed light on the sometimes dark and biased public responses to the men who committed sex murders. For example, while governments always claimed to dispassionately consider whether to commute sentences or issue pardons, internal correspondence shows the influence of racist assumptions and that officials, "privately, at least," were "shocked and angered by sex murders" (11) in ways that likely affected decisions about whether to hang perpetrators. The case studies also provide opportunities to tease out the reasons for the statutory abolition of capital punishment in 1976 (though the last hangings occurred in 1962). Strange points to several factors that ultimately fuelled the movement for abolition, including the "use of coercive police tactics; poor people's inability to fund their defence; the courts' strict definition of insanity; the impediments against criminal appeals; the lack of...