Editor, The News:
Re: Have No Fear (News Views, Jan. 21).
Now that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has fashioned a segue for far right-wing Conservatives to emerge from their bastions of ignorance, intolerance, and plain savagery, it would do reasoned citizens good to have a read of The Last To Die, by Robert J. Hoshowsky (Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2007).
Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas were hanged, back to back, in Toronto’s Don Jail under the auspices of Canada’s hangman, using the pseudonym Arthur Ellis.
Lucas, a hulk of a man, when dropped left a nightmarish scene: “His head was torn right off. It was hanging just by the sinews of the neck ... Everybody was taken aback by the spray of blood, a horrendous display of blood that was literally like a water pipe had burst. There was blood all over the floor and the walls were sprayed with blood.”
Sadly, but more so unjustly, his conviction was achieved by prosecutors who built their case entirely on circumstantial evidence.
There is no such thing as a humane way to execute someone and, by extension, the beef, fowl and pork that each year end up in a variety of presentations on our plates.
No murderer has ever murdered humanely, thus I challenge the logic of death penalty advocates calling upon Canadians to stoop to the level of an animal.
Capital punishment is a convenient way to be vengeful.
Without it’s abolition in 1976, we today would be saddled with the memory of execution for Donald Marshall, Guy-Paul Morin, David Milgaard, James Driskell, Romeo Phillion, and Thomas Sophonow. And those are the ones we know were innocent.
I want the Paul Bernardos, Willy Picktons and Clifford Olsons of the world to rot in jail; that’s as much vengeance as I’ll take responsibility for.
Mark O’Neill
Maple Ridge