Capital Punishment, what is it? Well Capital punishment is more or less, the death sentence. Basically when someone commits a really serious crime, they kill them. In Canada, in the early days, we had Capital Punishment as well, but only for premeditated murder and murder of an on duty law man. Luckily, in Canada, we got rid of Capital Punishment in 1976, and we also took it away from the Canadian National Defence Act in 1988. Now let’s get into Capital Punishment in the short story “Two Fishermen”. In this short story a man named Thomas Delany is supposed to be hanged for protecting his wife from a man who was molesting her named, Mathew Rinehart. If this were to have happened in Canada it would’ve had to happen before the year 1976 (Because that’s the year we abolished Capital Punishment), and it happened in the middle of the town for all people to see, so it most likely happened closer to 1865, (Because that’s when we originally introduced Capital Punishment) I’m thinking early 1900’s.

Now let’s move onto why Thomas Delany should not have been hanged like he was. Now Thomas Delany did commit a murder, but it was in the Defence of his wife, who was at the time being sexually assaulted, which I might add would have gotten Mathew Rinehart the death penalty for his actions anyway. Not only that, but Thomas Delany didn’t plan on committing this crime, so it wasn’t premeditated, it was in self defence, as Mathew Rinehart had also started to beat up Thomas for attempting to stop him from what he was doing. In my opinion Thomas shouldn’t have gotten any penalty, because it was self defence and he was defending his wife.