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Dancing on air : vengeance, mercy and the death penalty in Newfoundland / Eric Colbourne.

by Colbourne, Eric F. (Eric Freeman), 1944-

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364.6609718 C684d

Capital punishment -- Newfoundland and Labrador -- History.

Hanging -- Newfoundland and Labrador -- History.

Trials (Murder) -- Newfoundland and Labrador -- History.

Newfoundland and Labrador -- History.

9781927099827 (pbk.)

159 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 23 cm.

Previously published: Victoria, British Columbia : FriesenPress, 2015.

Includes index.

Some copies may be permabound.

On St. Patrick's Day, 1942, a quiet St. John's neighbourhood awoke to terrified screams as the bloodied body of nineteen-year-old Josephine O'Brien was discovered in a downtown boarding house. Beaten to death with a flat iron, police soon arrested her fiancé Herbert Spratt. British governor Sir Humphrey Walwyn sentenced Spratt to death. Six years later, Alfred Beaton was tried for shooting Dorothea Manuel to death during a night of terror in the community of Norris Arm. While the new British governor, Sir Gordon Macdonald, was deciding between prison and the gallows for Beaton, a mysterious letter-writer emerges from the political wilderness of 1940s Newfoundland and attempts to turn the tide of public opinion against the death penalty. Eric Colbourne offers the gripping account of a flawed justice system, the agony of victims of violence, and a political awakening in Newfoundland and Labrador. Eric Colbourne is also the author of Disappeared: Stories from the Coast of Newfoundland.

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