‘Sadists and Softies:’ Gender and the Abolition of the Death Penalty in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 30 September 1959, Steven Truscott was sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of Lynne Harper. Canadians were divided over the death penalty, and Truscott was the youngest Canadian in history to be sentenced to hang. This article uses the Truscott case to explore the ways in which gender expectations in Cold-War Canada affected the depiction of abolitionists in the 1966-67 death penalty debate. Retentionists accused abolitionists of being “soft” on crime, overly emotional, sentimental, and effeminate, despite the fact that both men and women took part. Masculinity and abolitionism were considered incompatible. The movement to abolish capital punishment illuminated Canadians’ insecurities about changing perceptions of the justice system, and these fears manifested themselves in a gendered discourse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.071 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".