With Malice Aforethought: Six Spectacular Canadian Trials

Christopher English is a history professor at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Three of the murder trials profiled in this book will be familiar to
adult Canadians, either because of the publicity they received when they
took place or because the verdicts of guilt were questioned and debated
in successive years. Revisiting the cases of Wilbert Coffin (1953),
Steven Truscott (1959), and Peter Demeter (1974), legal historian David
Williams elucidates the limitations of the judicial process with respect
to each. Findings of guilt on circumstantial evidence alone (especially
when the penalty was execution, as in Coffin’s case) will give readers
pause, but Williams is convinced that the verdicts were justified by the
evidence and by the law as it then stood.

The three other cases will prove less familiar, but the author once
again quietly educates the reader in the substance and limits of the law
that shaped the outcome of each. Readers will be entertained and
instructed as Williams recounts clearly and economically the case of
Patrick James Whelan, who was accused of assassinating D’Arcy McGee, a
father of Confederation, in 1868, or of Louis Riel’s 1885 trial for
treason and subsequent execution. In neither case are they likely to
disagree with the verdict. Whether Riel should have been executed is a
separate issue, one ultimately decided by the Canadian government. The
interesting case of 8-year-old Ernest Chenoweth, tried in 1900 for the
murder of a Chinese immigrant, was, in its final disposal, the obverse
of the Riel case. Readers who may take issue with the author on Coffin
or Truscott, the most contentious cases among the six, will surely
endorse his conclusion that on Chenoweth justice was done.