Canada to Weigh Restoration of Death Penalty : Measure Expected to Pass Even Though Public Shows Little Interest in Issue

Nearly a quarter-century ago, in a dismal Toronto jail, a hangman placed nooses around the necks of Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas and, in the morbid slang of 18th-Century England, they “danced upon nothing.”

The December, 1962, execution of the two murderers was effectively the end of capital punishment in Canada, although it was not until 1976 that the House of Commons voted, 133 to 125, to abolish the death penalty.

That decision has not rested easily in this country, at least not among politicians, and Canada is now on the verge of a new debate about capital punishment. As it stands, those who want death as society’s ultimate punishment are expected to win.

Why the issue has been revived is something of a puzzle. Even though the arguments are familiar to Americans--deterrence, morality, punishment, vengeance--the debate here seems to be taking place in a vacuum. For Canada by any measure is a nation without a serious crime problem, especially in comparison with the United States.

Low Homicide Rate

In Toronto, Canada’s largest city, there were 37 homicides in 1986, all but four of them solved. Los Angeles, a city of roughly the same size, had 711 homicides in the same year. In fact, in 1985, the last year for which full figures are available, there were 704 homicides in all of Canada, fewer than there were in Detroit.

Nationally, Canada’s per-capita murder rate in 1985 was 2.78 per 100,000 population. In the United States, the rate was 7.9. Among Western, industrialized nations, only Japan, New Zealand, Britain and Belgium had measurably better statistics.

To add to the mystery of why restoration of the death penalty has come up is the statistic that Canada’s homicide rate was 3.09 per 100,000 in 1975, the last year capital punishment was still technically in effect. It has not been that high since.

If Canada is such a relatively safe nation, with homicide comprising less than 1% of all violent crimes, why then is it moving toward executions after a lengthy process scheduled to begin with a parliamentary debate later this month and expected to end next year?

Evidently not because of public pressure. The most recent public opinion poll, taken in mid-March, showed that while 73% of Canadians favor the death penalty when asked about it, only 5% consider its restoration an important issue.

Yet Prime Minister Brian Mulroney overcame his expressed personal objections to the death penalty and promised during the 1984 federal elections to let Parliament vote on the matter. He even took the unusual step of saying that members could vote their consciences rather than following, as they normally do, the line set by party leaders.

And a poll by Maclean’s magazine of 279 members of the House of Commons indicated that 49% favor restoration, while only 35% oppose it and 16% are uncommitted. Nearly all parliamentary experts say that without an unexpected and sudden turnaround, the restoration measure will pass easily.

The reasons for this situation are as varied and numerous as are the so-called experts asked about it. Yet one factor appears to have been more important than any other: a true believer named Bill Domm, who is showing what one determined person can do to arouse a dormant issue.

Domm is a 55-year-old Conservative member of Parliament from the small eastern Ontario city of Peterborough whose seven years in the House of Commons have gone unmarked except for his zealous promotion of two issues: ridding Canada of the metric system and bringing back the death penalty.

He was only partially successful in his fight for the inch and the gallon, gaining equality for them but not superiority over the centimeter and liter. Domm is determined to do better on the death-penalty issue.

“I’ve been behind it for seven years, ever since I was elected in ‘79,” he said during an interview in the tiny office suite that is all his status as a backbencher entitles him to.

“Execution is a reasonable form of justice,” he said, adding that he would just as soon see death sentences carried out by injection rather than by hanging, the means employed to put to death about 450 criminals in Canada since the nation was founded in 1867.

As the son of a Protestant minister who opposed the death penalty, Domm is familiar with the arguments that capital punishment is barbaric and immoral, and he is ready with counter-arguments.

“The measure of the sanctity of life is how you deal with the person who (first) violated that sanctity,” he said. “Society shows the sanctity it has for life by how it punishes those who violate the sanctity of human life.”

Emphasizes Statistics

But it is not the moral argument that most interests Domm. Statistics are the name of his game, especially those that are produced by polling the public. As he talks in an office full of surveys, his secretary sits outside the door trying to cope with cartons full of telegrams and letters. The correspondence is almost all in response to surveys and other material mailed out by Domm and his allies.

“We’re getting 2,000 pieces a mail a day,” the secretary said with a weary smile. “Yes, they’re almost all in favor” of the death penalty.

For this, and for the constancy of the public opinion in his favor, Domm can take almost all the credit. Almost no one else is aggressively carrying a brief for the death penalty. Even the Assn. of Chiefs of Police, while officially endorsing capital punishment, has declined to lead the argument.

And by generating public interest and public support, Domm almost single-handedly has made passage of a death-penalty bill all but certain. With a confidence bred from perpetual lobbying among his colleagues, he sneers at the Maclean’s figure of 49% backing in the House of Commons for his position. “We’re going to get a 60% to 65% vote in Parliament,” he said.

If Domm’s near-solitary but successful campaign is a sign of a less-than-enthusiastic public, the indifference is underlined by a lack of a determined, large-scale opposition. If Domm is a “Gang of One” for the death penalty, then Edward Greenspan is a unitary mob for keeping it abolished.

Canada’s best-known criminal lawyer, Greenspan has all but abandoned his very lucrative practice to take on Domm. In an interview in his office in the middle of Toronto’s financial center, the chubby, 43-year-old defense attorney sat swinging his feet behind the table that he uses as a desk and spoke with the intensity and the single-minded purpose of his chief opponent.

“I don’t want to live in a country that allows such a barbarity,” he said. “It is morally repugnant. Besides, there is no need for it.

“Domm scares the hell out of people by saying there is an accelerating crime rate. He is lying. . . . There is a misconception, a fear of crime that bears no relation to the reality of crime.”

Greenspan stands mostly alone. Various church groups have expressed opposition but have not pushed very hard publicly; a proposed coalition of anti-capital punishment groups still has the feel of a pickup basketball team talking about what needs to be done rather than doing it.

Greenspan’s early preparation, particularly in readying himself for a series of debates with Domm, evidenced more conviction than organization. When Domm quoted statistics from a newly released study that seemed to buttress his case, Greenspan could only retort by blurting out that the legislator was “a liar.”

The lack of preparation resulted partly from Greenspan’s hope that when the parliamentary debate begins, leading politicians, particularly Mulroney, would emerge to attack the death penalty.

“I have every expectation that the prime minister will do it,” Domm said. “When push comes to shove, he won’t sit back. Trudeau (Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who was prime minister when capital punishment was abolished) made his greatest speech in Parliament during the last debate and made the difference. If Mulroney follows his convictions and makes a very strong speech, he will influence his party.”

Figures Support Both Sides

Greenspan also says he is now ready to take on Domm with statistics.

As is often the case, the figures and studies can be used by either side. If the homicide rate is lower now than when the death penalty was in effect, it has been rising in recent years.

Domm says the number of first-degree murder charges has gone up over the last five years; Greenspan argues that the figures only reflect prosecutorial determination to gain advantage in plea-bargaining by filing the most serious charges possible. He cites statistics indicating a fall in second-degree murder charges.

When Greenspan argues that recent American studies show that the number of homicides has fallen 16% among U.S. states without the death penalty, Domm counters by saying that states with capital punishment show a 27% drop.

Domm answers the argument that innocent people might be executed by quoting from a study claiming that an investigation of 7,000 first-degree murder convictions in Canada and the United States over the years found “not one known execution of a person found by a court or government to have been wrongfully convicted.”

Greenspan in turn cites the recent case of a Canadian man who served 11 years of a life sentence for a second-degree murder committed by someone else.

And so it goes, each side disputing the other with equally convincing numbers, leading to the conclusion that statistics are inconclusive.

But it is clear that the Canadian public believes that crime, particularly violent and murderous crime, is a major problem for the country, even though the figures clearly show that it is not.

That may be a major reason why Domm has been able to take the capital punishment issue to the floor of Parliament.

“This issue has captured the minds of the people,” Domm said in the interview, “and we as legislators . . . have to satisfy society.”