CANADA. POLICE CHIEF COMES OUT AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY

the death penalty has no place in Canada's criminal justice system, even when dealing with brutal killers such as Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said at the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the city's first jail and "hanging yard."
"There are more enlightened ways in which a society can deal with protecting itself," said chief Bill Blair.
The impending release of Homolka, who served 12 years for her role in the deaths of schoolgirls Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy, had put Canada's treatment of violent offenders back on the national agenda and rekindled new debate about the age-old issue.
A 1999 Ipsos-Reid poll found that 52 per cent of Canadians were in favour of reinstating the death penalty, while 65 per cent supported it for serial killers. A poll released in December 2004 suggested that the number of Canadians in support of capital punishment had dipped by 10 percentage points. Bernardo was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 25 years in September of 1995. Homolka received a 12-year jail sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of manslaughter.
Death by hanging was the penalty for murder in Canada between 1892 and 1961.
In 1966, the government passed a bill that limited capital punishment to the killing of on-duty police officers and prison guards.
Nine years later, the House of Commons abolished capital punishment from the Criminal Code and replaced it with a mandatory life sentence of 25 years for those convicted of first-degree murder.
The first prisoner to be hanged in Toronto was John Sullivan during the jail's first year, while the first woman was Julia Murdock. She was hanged in 1837.
According to Bell, many of those who were hanged at the Toronto landmark were far from violent criminals.
"The people we were hanging were people who were stealing candy or bread to feed their families," said Bell. "There were good people who said 'this is wrong.' And then those people would have been hanged."