1956: Wilbert Coffin

ExecutedToday.com ^ | February 10, 2009 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

Just after midnight this day in 1956, Wilbert Coffin hanged for murdering three American tourists — a case that has since entered Canadian annals as a paradigmatic wrongful execution.

The aptly-named Coffin affair saw the prospector sent up on an entirely circumstantial case.

Under the pressure of losing tourist dollars to breathless coverage in the U.S., and with the aid of a desultory defense attorney, the Coffin case was rushed along to completion. Though sympathy in Gaspe seems to have been considerable, its elevation to cause celebre was likewise bound up in Quebec politics, pushed by foes of powerful, unscrupulous premier Maurice Duplessis.

Gadfly journalist Jacques Hebert (not the guillotined French Revolution demagogue of the same name, of course) published three books on the case (the 1963 volume immoderately titled J’accuse les assassins de Coffin landed him in jail)...

[BluH2o]

My mother is from the Gaspe Peninsula in eastern Quebec where this crime occurred … I also lived there for several years as a youngster. The general consensus of opinion all along the Gaspe coast … which borders the Baie des Chaleurs (south side of the peninsula) is that Wilbert Coffin was wrongfully convicted and executed. This goes back to that era … years that I lived on the Gaspe coast.
Of interest, the Coffin name is liberally sprinkled along the north east coast of the U.S. (Nantucket for instance) & eastern Canada. So they were obviously seafarers.