December 11, 1962. On that day, Canada turned off the lights on capital punishment for good. The stage: Toronto’s Don Jail. The players: Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, two men hanged in what would be the final act of state-sanctioned execution in Canadian history. It’s a dark story with a silver lining—a cautionary tale, a reckoning, and, oddly enough, a moment of hope.
Arthur Lucas was an American from Georgia, of all places—a place not exactly famous for its abolitionist tendencies. Lucas was convicted of murdering Therland Crater, a Detroit drug dealer who had made the bold life choice to moonlight as a police informant. Evidence included Lucas’s ring, found in a pool of blood at the crime scene, and bloodstains in his car matching the victims’ blood types.
His co-star in this grim double feature, Ronald Turpin, was a Canadian who shot and killed a police officer while fleeing the scene of a robbery. And thus, these two men, connected by nothing but tragedy and a gallows pole, became the faces of a nation’s pivot away from the death penalty.
A Nation Steps Back from the Brink
But why did Canada step away from the noose? Let’s be honest: it wasn’t out of love for criminals or because Canadians are soft, maple syrup-swilling pacifists who’d rather apologize to a murderer than punish him. No, it was about something deeper—something smarter. Canada realized that the death penalty wasn’t working. It wasn’t a deterrent. It wasn’t justice. And most of all, it wasn’t infallible.
Imagine this: you’re building a house of justice. What kind of foundation do you want? Bricks of fairness and beams of evidence, right? The death penalty, by contrast, was like building your house on quicksand. Sure, it looks solid at first, but then comes the sinking realization that maybe—not definitely, but maybe—you just executed an innocent person. It’s justice by Ouija board, and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
A key concern was the possibility of wrongful convictions. As the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow once said, “I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” Now, imagine reading an obituary knowing you accidentally helped write it. That’s not justice. That’s a bureaucratic oopsie of the highest order.
And then there was the philosophical shift. Canada began to see the death penalty as barbaric, medieval—like burning witches, but with worse PR.
Meanwhile, in America…
While Canada was busy hanging up its hangman’s rope, the United States decided to double down. Capital punishment is still alive and well in the land of the free and the home of the… what, exactly? The lethal injection cocktail? It’s the only country where we execute people with the same efficiency we order drive-thru burgers: quick, impersonal, and just as prone to getting the order wrong.
To date, the U.S. has executed over 1,400 people since Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976. And yet, America’s murder rate? Still higher than Canada’s. If deterrence were the goal, the results are in, and they’re about as effective as using a screen door to hold back a flood.
It’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline because you really like the smell of it burning. It’s flashy, sure, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
A Murder Rate Without the Murder
Here’s the kicker: since Canada abolished capital punishment, its murder rate hasn’t soared—it fell. By 2009, the Canadian murder rate stood at 1.81 homicides per 100,000 people, down from about 3.0 in the mid-1970s. That’s a 40% drop. Meanwhile, America, the land where “an eye for an eye” still reigns supreme, has struggled to achieve similar declines.
Here’s a metaphor for you: Canada ditched the death penalty and got safer. The U.S. kept it and got… well, more executions. It’s like Canada chose to take a first-class ticket on a flight to safety, while America stayed on the sinking ship yelling, “It’s fine! We’ve got life rafts made of lead!”
Justice With a Smile (And a Shrug)
The Canadian approach is as practical as it is compassionate. If justice is a dinner party, Canada serves it up like a polite host—making sure everyone gets a fair portion, no one gets poisoned, and the tablecloth stays clean. The U.S.? It’s like a food fight at a middle school cafeteria—messy, impulsive, and someone always ends up wearing spaghetti on their head.
And yet, as we close the book on Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, there’s something else to remember: the families of their victims. They didn’t get closure from these executions. They got more grief, more headlines, and no real justice. What they needed was healing, and no hangman’s rope could give them that.
As Victor Hugo once said, “To kill a man is not to defend an idea; it is to kill a man.” Canada understood that. America, maybe it’s time to take a page from their book. Or at the very least, consider switching from the death penalty to life in prison. After all, it’s cheaper, it’s reversible, and—most importantly—you don’t have to build a justice system on quicksand.
