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

Carolyn Strange has been producing important work on legal history since the 1990s. Many academics have cited her books and articles on the history of capital punishment, women and the law, and moral reform (and have mined them for undergraduate lecture material). Toronto's Girl Problem: The Perils and Pleasures of the City (1995) remains a model of social/legal history. Although based in Australia, which makes research in Canada a challenge, Strange, with The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History, has written another book destined to become a classic.

The exact number of people sentenced to death in British North America prior to Confederation and who either were executed or had their sentences commuted is unknown. We do know that courts between 1867 and the de jure end to the death penalty sentenced nearly 1,500 people to be hanged for murder. Of these, 697 men and 13 women went to the gallows before the de facto abolition began in 1963 (when the federal cabinet started commuting all sentences to life in prison).

Strange's study focuses on 61 men convicted of "sex murder" after Confederation. Canada's Criminal Code contained no such offence; the author defines it as homicide accompanied by sodomy or sexual assault or murder cases, which, according to police and prosecutors, involved "perverted" individuals. Men who killed their spouses (who until the 1980s could not be charged with sexually assaulting them) were excluded. Strange reminds us that feminist criminology asserts that many killings of women have gone undetected or unpunished, even more so when victims have been minorities. Until 1961, there were no degrees of murder and the automatic sentence for a conviction was death. Nine convicted sex murderers avoided execution through appeals that led to acquittals or convictions for a non-capital offence.

The Death Penalty is organized chronologically, starting with a chapter on the politics of capital punishment. Other chapters deal with "sex fiends" in the early twentieth century, challenges to traditional notions of criminal responsibility in the interwar period, concerns about sexual psychopaths in the post-1945 era and the 1950s, and how sex murder intersected with the capital punishment debate in the 1960s. The epilogue examines the often emotional issue of sex murders in the years following the end of the death penalty in 1976. Strange not only explores the specific question of how Canadian juries, judges, experts, and bureaucrats responded to sex murder, but also elucidates how the Department of Justice and the federal cabinet responded to death sentences. Case studies sprinkled throughout illustrate changes and continuities in how the courts, the federal government, and the media responded to murders that usually shocked communities and generated public outrage. These examples of male violence directed at children and women, make for disturbing reading.

This is a well-researched book, with one page of notes for every two pages of text, and a helpful appendix on sources. Strange relies on newspapers, which in the period under review were "unreservedly sexist, racist, xenophobic, classist and homophobic" (p. 238). But she builds the study mainly on federal Department of Justice Capital Case Files assembled to provide advice to the federal cabinet, which decided the ultimate fate of convicted murderers. Although not all of these files are extant and some are more detailed than others, they are an invaluable primary source as they contain trial transcripts, crime scene photos, letters from trial judges, and case summaries by Department of Justice officials (including marginal comments by other officials) not to mention letters from other justice officials and the public as well as petitions from the public. Most of these sources, as well as federal cabinet minutes, were not known or released to the press or public at the time. They reveal—or at least suggest—the racial, ethnic, class, and other factors that determined whether condemned murderers would hang or be spared. One important finding is the role of key bureaucrats, such as Department of...