Phil Egan

Over the past 150 years Sarnia has seen has seen many changes, but perhaps none have been as profound as the changing mores of our justice system.

When I began school at Our Lady of Mercy School on Christina Street in 1953 I was confronted with a constant reminder of crime and punishment. Directly across Durand Street on the northeast corner of Christina sat the massive, three-storey stone jail built by Alexander Mackenzie a century earlier.

My grandfather was a guard at the Hamilton Jail, and I knew there had been executions at his jail. I wondered if any had taken place across the road from my school.

Thomas Cleary, an Irish Catholic, was the first prisoner ever executed at the old jail, which is now the site of a popular restaurant and motel. It happened on Dec. 5, 1862.

Justice was speedy in those days. Cleary’s murder of Edward Burke had taken place less than nine month earlier following a barhopping spree on St. Patrick’s Day.

There’s an old Irish saying that God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world, and whiskey was indeed the downfall of Thomas Cleary that day. Not a normally violent man, he blamed the death of his co-worker on intoxication.

Quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to die, Cleary was confined in a cell until his execution date. Few things can be as mentally unhinging as knowing the certain date of your death and watching it rapidly approach. Cleary resorted to prayer and the comforting presence of two priests.

Shortly before 9 a.m. the cell door opened and he was led, bound and with a white cap on his head, into the jail yard where a scaffold had been erected close to the top of the wall.

Praying aloud as he mounted the stairs unassisted, Cleary begged God for forgiveness as 400 spectators looked on. A masked executioner, using a thick rope and a ten-foot drop, then proceeded to botch Sarnia’s first execution. Cleary’s neck was only partly dislocated and he struggled at the end of the noose for several minutes before expiring.

Two more executions would follow at Sarnia Jail before capital punishment was banned.

In 1962, Ronald Turpin and Arthur Lucas became the last two prisoners executed in Canada at Toronto’s Don Jail. That was another horribly botched execution.

In today’s legal system, Thomas Cleary might have only been convicted of manslaughter.