Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of the execution of Ronald Ryan. Just before 8 o’clock on the morning of February 3, 1967, Ryan declined a sedative but took a sip of whisky and walked calmly to the gallows trapdoor at Pentridge Prison.
Ryan addressed his executioner directly, “God bless you, please make it quick.”
Ryan’s supporters and opponents of the death penalty observed a three-minute silence. Protesters assembled outside Pentridge Prison in vigil.
The circumstances of his death at the hands of the state have led to great myth-making about Ryan. He has been variously painted as a bit of a larrikin, driven to crime by circumstance and little worse than a kite flyer (passer of bad cheques).
The truth is he was a career criminal and his crimes before his penultimate arrest, included what we would call today aggravated burglary and robbery in company.
His arresting officer on that occasion was Bryan Harding. I’ve known Harding for many years. He was an outstanding police officer and at various times headed up the Fraud and Homicide squads in Victoria. Harding is retired and now in his 80s; he remembers Ryan as a hardened criminal who showed little or no remorse for his crimes and gave nothing away under questioning.
Full column here.
JTI. I caught a show called Jack Irish on the ABC. You should have your people contact their people. You would be an outstanding character in the series. You could be Jack Irish’s go to man for information and history. It is centred around Fitzroy.
Great pub scenes in that show.
yep. Pity the plots and some of the events depicted are so laughable. Started well and went downhill rapidly.
That’s why I reckon JTI could add some realism by meeting with Jack Irish regularly in the Pub to fill him in on the history of the people he is pursuing.
I have watched EVERY episode of that fantastic. Another great show is Rebus with John Hanna and Ken Stott. Brilliant stuff. You cannot beat the Poms for the best cop series:- Inspector George Gently, Shetland, Southcliffe, DI Banks, Code of a Killer, Life of Crime, Case Histories, Luther, WPC 56, Good Cop, Line of Duty, Foyle’s War, Wallender English/Netherlands), Kidnap and Ransom…all brilliant. I don’t like USA crime. Mostly in episode…you have to watch for 10 weeks. Poms have much better acting as well. One USA movie series I really like is Jesse Stone.
I have only seen ten minutes of one episode of Wallender, when I woke up the episode was over😝give me a Midsomer Murders any day, the John Nettles episodes that is
Did you ever see him in Bererac. Great stuff.
You should catch some of the SBS on Demand stuff Bassy. Midnight Sun series is good -and there are a couple of others there that are high quality.
Please give me all of the titles
I’ll get right into it…..
Ah well Bassy, it depends on your tastes. I like the foreign ones – French. Scandinavian in particular. There are also some good British ones. I don’t do American. Nor does SBS
Trapped
Spiral
Criminal Justice
Just go to SBS on Demand and select Featured Drama Series. Heaps of them
There are also hundreds of movies. Free to air. Some goodies in there too.
I like all of the foreign ones…mostly I like crime, detective whodunnit. The Scandinavians are great at crime. I also like complete episodes …not really into waiting 10 weeks to find out whodunnit. Varg Veum is an INCREDIBLE private investigator series.
All the episodes are there – you can watch them one after the other if you’re into binge-watching!
OOps I got Jack Irish mixed up with Jack Taylor…the Jack Taylor series is well worth a look. Fabulous acting. Jack Taylor is an Irish television drama based on the Ken Bruen novel series. Set in Galway. It is about an ex cop who got the bullet for punching his boss’s light out. He is now a private dick taking on the cases nobody else will Bald.
I saw one under duress. It was effing ridiculous.
Not to mention Midsomer Murders, Poirot and Miss Marple.
Crikey! An aficionado! I’ve watched Shetland, a few Wallanders and a couple of episodes of “Good Cop”. How did that end up?
I can’t watch any of them. They make me either laugh or cringe.
I believe many States of the USA still have the Death Penalty, Mr Insider, most by lethal injection these days I believe. I do feel sorry for those that have to witness this ghastly thing however heinous the crime and the US certainly have had many degusting killers etc like Ted Bundy and the like. I do doubt Australia will ever bring back the Death Penalty.
All by lethal injection now although in Utah, a condemned man can opt for the firing squad if he so decides. It’s nice to have a choice. Interestingly, no doctors or physicians will perform the lethal injection – the Hippocratic Oath and all that. Nurses, too, do not participate. So prison guards are trained to give the IV injections and operate the death machines sometimes with unintended and rather appalling consequences.
Gruesome choices, both of them. An overdose in capsule form would be less traumatic for all maybe. Not a pleasant thing to talk about.
All this mucking about with three separate chemicals to anaesthetise, paralyse and finally induce cardiac arrest is often cruel and is certainly unusual. If they need to use the needle I still can’t figure out why they don’t use a hot-shot of heroin.
Nitrogen would be the easiest solution and entirely painless. Fill a chamber with nitrogen, pushing out other gases and people just suffocate without even realising what’s going on. One of the reasons the stuff is so dangerous is it doesn’t activate any of the physiological responses that induce any sense of anything going wrong. Cheap, easy, painless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation
Or an overdose of nembutal…U just go to sleep (er but you don’t wake up).
Exactly. All that other stuff – strapping them down, hooking up machines, tilting them upwards so they can say cheerio to the audience is truly macabre.
They could just slug a glass of Nembutal, Nitsche (?spelling) style. I’m a fan of Nitsche – met him at a talk down here. I support voluntary euthanasia.
go hyperbaric and narc ’em…..silly as a wheel…boom dead
In a similar vein (sorry), the supply of killing drugs has been drying up due to the ethical qualms of pharmaceutical companies. Yes, you read that right:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-end-of-the-open-market-for-lethal-injection-drugs
This has led some US states to improvise with various home-brews, usually with results even more gruesome and unreliable than the standard method. I find it’s always so much more pleasant to watch an execution done with the paralysing drug, as the convulsions that otherwise occur are so unsightly.
Another factor which has limited supply has been the human-rights-based EU ban on sales. A great opportunity for an enterprising post-Brexit UK startup. Sadly, I’m almost certain that several people are already way ahead of me.
Difficult those days having callous crimes committed .
The Graham Thorne comes to mknd from murderer Steven Bradley and his wife fleeing on a ship , then arrested near Figi. Steven was found in a boot of a car .They were calling for the death penalty over this .
As a court officer in New Zealand from 1975 to 1989, I heard some very interesting stories and sometimes harrowing stories. On of the later concerned one of the hangings in New Zealand in the 1950s. My then boss at the time had been a junior clerk at the time. His boss at the time was the Registrar of the Supreme Court at Auckland and as Sheriff had to attend each hanging. When he returned to the court after it he was in such a state that he had to go home for the rest of the day.
My boss said the irony of the situation was that the boy they hanged was not the same boy who had committed the murder and had reformed himself while inside awaiting trial and then sentence. If ever there was a case for commutation of sentence this was it.
Another good article from Paul Kelly today.
Any movie fans out there? Saw a very good one yesterday – Manchester by the Sea. Don’t be put off by the title. Not the UK city. It should be right up there in best film of the year category. Gut wrenching and very powerful story of human emotion and grief.
Saw Lion too – cried from beginning to end. Geez I’m rung out!!
That should be ”wrung out” Can’t let that slip through!!
Just as well you iron your sheets before wearing them.
Ok, I can’t help myself, and as mentioned is not the point of the essay. But anywho,, I can’t argue or dismiss the logic in Jack’s point regarding the death penalty and the model of society exampled upon its worst members. I can only disagree, and yes from the comfort of my back deck. Certainly, from a Christian upbringing, and possibly if that wasn’t the case, I cannot pretend to guess my actions if I was ever in a position to determine a death penalty. So from my relative isolation I can only use the recent case of the murder of the young Daniel Morecambe. The grub charged with his murder had prior convictions. The one prior (from memory) took place in the NT, and from my many and varied readings of crimes was perhaps the most repulsive I have read. Depravity, inhumanity, callousness etc writ large, manifest, palpable and present. Yet rather than be incarcerated for life, or subject to the death penalty, this horror was left to walk the streets and subsequently kill again.
If we are against the death penalty then o would suggest a guaranteed life sentence that involved serious hard labour. this would involve creating our own canal du midi from Darwin down to Adelaide (and when finished one from perth to brisvegas). Hard enough work to have them thinking the death penalty would be a blessing.
Anywho, just a few thoughts I wanted to throw in here.
Our whole modern punishment system needs a 100% overhaul, Milton. Prisons are, of course, derived from the Christian concept that if you look someone in a cell and tell them to contemplate their sins for long enough they will come out a better person. I think its safe to say that many hundreds of years of experience have shown that the reality doesnt match the theory.
Prior to the creation of prisons the system of punishments was a bit more brutal although I do not know whether those methods were more effective. My favourite example is the old market courts – yes folks, hundreds of years ago, and for many hundreds of years, there was – literally – a court for pretty much everything. Any market vendor caught and convicted by the market court for, say having his finger on the scales, wrongly “adjusted” scales ( a very big deal), with rotten produce, or with chalk in his milk (a common practice to whiten milk and or hide the fact that it had been diluted with water) would end up in the market stocks, where market attendees were encouraged to throw the market’s rotten produce at the offender(s). Since this could, occassionally, be a fatal experience, English markets were famed for their relatively fair trading. There were, incidentally, a host of such market regulations covering food health and safety standards. (anyone interested: “An Englishman’s Food; a history of 5 centuries of English Diet” Drummond and Wilbrahim).
I dont know what the solution is – it would take a professional (or academic) study, and a very big one – to come up with appropriate recommendations – but I do know the solution is not prison for everyone and the death penalty. Its frustrating that no government has commissioned any study of this stuff because criminaliy and recidivism is fundamental to the wellbeing and safety of our community.
I find it interesting that a lot of our schools are modelled, architecturally, on Bentham’s panopticon. Then again a lot of our pedagogical practices are informed by tests on animals. Anywho, off to the pokies … tehe!
Not sure about hanging but I’ll reiterate my support for burning arsonists at the stake. And using a rattan to flog the tatts off any selfie-taking hero who only gets brave when he’s full of drink and drugs. Far too many of that sort about.
…. and grumpy old troglodytes.
I would never do that to you, JB.
Sicilian bull?
Anything involving combustion. It’s all good.
6 women were burned at the stake in Newgate prison in the 1800s TBLS. Cant remember what for. We humans are barbaric but its not that long ago that we were even more barbaric.
The strategic pork belly reserve at a 50-year low! http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38836782
Dwight – the late Christopher Hitchens quite rightly observed that pigs (also primates and elephants) care for each other with parent-child bonding and solidarity in the face of danger.
“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”
― Winston S. Churchill
And delicious too…
One of those curious rituals of American life, to cite Bill Murray, “It’s Groundhog Day, again.” In about an hour and a half, Punxsutawney Phil will predict Spring. But, poor Phil is only right 39% of the time. However, he never homogenizes his data.
You’ll cop it for that last line Dwight!
That poor terrified little creature confronted with a seething mass of yelping yokels. What sort of forecasting precision do you expect? Pah, cultural throwbacks!
Our BOM dreams of getting it right 39% of the time!
I remember the hanging well and only young but Bolte loved being on the front page of every paper in Oz. Ryan was a hardened criminal though and knew how he would end up. It was pure politics though.
Brian Bourke was Ryan’s defence counsel and here is a link to a discussion with him with John Faine
http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2017/01/31/4612093.htm?§ion=latest&date=20170202T2123