A Man is Hanged

“It was shortly after suppertime on the evening of December 10, 1962, when a brusque Toronto lawyer named Walter Williston was admitted around the wooden screen, through the two sets of barred gates and into Hospital Nine for a final conference with his client, a fifty-four-year-old Negro from Detroit named Arthur Lucas. The word had come through from Ottawa that morning: the Diefenbaker cabinet, after careful consideration, had declined to commute Lucas’s death sentence; he and the man in the next cell, a twenty-eight-year old man named Ronald Turpin, who had been convicted of killing a policeman, would hang together as scheduled, at one minute after midnight the following morning.”

Alexander Ross – Maclean’s – September 1965

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