Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History

Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History
Author: Carolyn Strange
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487508379

This is the first historical study to examine changing perceptions of sexual murder and the treatment of sex killers while the death penalty was in effect in Canada.

The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History

The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History
Author: Carolyn Strange
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487538111

From Confederation to the partial abolition of the death penalty a century later, defendants convicted of sexually motivated killings and sexually violent homicides in Canada were more likely than any other condemned criminals to be executed for their crimes. Despite the emergence of psychiatric expertise in criminal trials, moral disgust and anger proved more potent in courtrooms, the public mind, and the hearts of the bureaucrats and politicians responsible for determining the outcome of capital cases. Wherever death has been set as the ultimate criminal penalty, the poor, minority groups, and stigmatized peoples have been more likely to be accused, convicted, and executed. Although the vast majority of convicted sex killers were white, Canada’s racist notions of "the Indian mind" meant that Indigenous defendants faced the presumption of guilt. Black defendants were also subjected to discriminatory treatment, including near lynchings. In debates about capital punishment, abolitionists expressed concern that prejudices and poverty created the prospect of wrongful convictions. Unique in the ways it reveals the emotional drivers of capital punishment in delivering inequitable outcomes, The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History provides a thorough overview of sex murder and the death penalty in Canada. It serves as an essential history and a richly documented cautionary tale for the present.

Kiss of Death

Kiss of Death
Author: John D. Bessler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2003
Genre: Law
ISBN:

Documents the life stories of death-row prisoners and the author's experiences as a pro bono attorney on Texas death penalty cases to present arguments for the abolishment of state-sanctioned executions.

Let the Lord Sort Them

Let the Lord Sort Them
Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1524760277

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.

Westward Bound

Westward Bound
Author: Lesley Erickson
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2011-08-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0774818603

Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940. Erickson’s analysis of these cases shows that, rather than a desire to protect, official responses to the most intimate or violent acts betrayed an impulse to shore up the liberal order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones draws prairie Canada into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building.

Death Sentence

Death Sentence
Author: Jerry Bledsoe
Publisher: Diversion Books
Total Pages: 546
Release: 2014-05-18
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1626812888

In this “true story that reads like a novel,” the #1 New York Times–bestselling author reveals the facts behind a notorious Southern murder case (Library Journal). When North Carolina farmer Stuart Taylor died after a sudden illness, his forty-six-year-old fiancée, Velma Barfield, was overcome with grief. Taylor’s family grieved with her—until the autopsy revealed traces of arsenic poisoning. Turned over to the authorities by her own son, Velma stunned her family with more revelations. This wasn’t the first time she had committed cold-blooded murder, and she would eventually be tried by the “world’s deadliest prosecutor” and sentenced to death. This book probes Velma’s stark descent into madness, her prescription drug addiction, and her effort to turn her life around through Christianity. From her harrowing childhood to the crimes that incited a national debate over the death penalty, to the final moments of her execution, Velma Barfield’s life of crime and punishment, revenge and redemption, this is crime reporting at its most gripping and profound. “A painfully intimate, moving story about the life and death of the only woman executed in the U.S. between 1962–1998 . . . With graceful writing and thorough reporting, it makes the reader look hard at something dark and sad in the human soul . . . Breathes new life into the true crime genre.” —The News & Observer “Undertakes to answer the questions about the justice system and the motives that drive women to kill.” —The Washington Post Book World “An extraordinary piece of writing . . . The most chilling description of a legal execution that we are ever likely to get.” —Citizen-Times “Taut and engrossing on the nature of justice and the death penalty as well as on guilt and responsibility.” —Booklist

Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment
Author: Canada. Department of Justice
Publisher:
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1965
Genre: Capital punishment
ISBN:

This paper highlights arguments put forward in support of the retention or the abolition of the death penalty. Appendices to the report include crime indices, homicide statistics, execution and death sentence statistics, extracts from reports and relevant sections of Canada's criminal code defining and classifying murder.

The Trial of Steven Truscott

The Trial of Steven Truscott
Author: Isabel Lebourdais
Publisher: Toronto ; Montreal : McClelland and Stewart
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1966
Genre: Harper, Lynne
ISBN:

In 1960 at the age of 14, Steven Truscott was sentenced to death for the murder of Lynne Harper, aged 12yrs. Truscott was in a death cell for most of 4 months; then his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He spent the next 3 years in the Guelph Training School, and in January 1963 was transferred to the federal penitentiary at Kingston, Ontario. But was he guilty? The author reviews the case and presents evidence of his innocence.

Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven
Author: Jon Krakauer
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2004-06-08
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1400078997

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, this extraordinary work of investigative journalism takes readers inside America’s isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities. • Now an acclaimed FX limited series streaming on HULU. “Fantastic.... Right up there with In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song.” —San Francisco Chronicle Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a multi-layered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith. Along the way he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

The Ken and Barbie Killers

The Ken and Barbie Killers
Author: Peter Vronsky
Publisher: RJ PARKER PUBLISHING, INC.
Total Pages: 161
Release:
Genre: True Crime
ISBN:

"WARNING- This book contains police and court transcripts of audio and descriptions of extremely graphic sexual violence contained in videotapes made by the perpetrators." Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were so perfectly iconic as a newlywed couple that they were dubbed "Ken and Barbie". But their marriage had a dark side involving sex, death, and videotape. The 'perfect couple' first raped and murdered Karla's little sister and then kidnapped teenage schoolgirls whom they enslaved, raped, tortured and killed while gleefully recording themselves on video doing it. Vronsky will take you on the journey from the Scarborough Rapist (Bernardo) to Bordelais (Homolka's current last name) and her return to Canada in October, 2014 from the island of Gaudeloupe where she lived for several years with her husband and three children. WITH (21) PHOTOS