Abolition Coalitions: Campaigning against the Death Penalty in Early Twentieth-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accounts of the death penalty’s abolition in Canada in 1976 invariably trace its origin to the man who presented five private members’ abolition bills in the 1910s: Member of Parliament Robert Bickerdike (1843–1928). Characterized as a lone campaigner, his failure inspired later abolitionists, including John Diefenbaker. Death penalty scholars have thus far treated Bickerdike similarly, without exploring his motivations, arguments, tactics, and allies. This article examines the religious and secular rationales of Bickerdike’s opposition to the death penalty and demonstrates how he attracted and joined supporters of his cause, including trade unionists, suffragists, and prisoner welfare advocates, who lobbied for clemency, particularly in cases of women and youths sentenced to death. Their unsuccessful campaign to save Filumena Lassandro from execution in 1923 inspired a eugenically tinged abolition bill, tabled in 1924, which also failed. Despite the civilizationist, chivalric, ethnocentric, and ableist biases in Bickerdike’s and his allies’ abolitionism, their emphasis on the rights of the accused and their criticism of unequal access to justice laid the groundwork for the social justice movements and rights lobbying of the 1950s and 1960s, not just the campaign to the abolish the death penalty.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.050 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".