Ontario and Quebec to let him use an alternative method in which the condemned person was jerked into the air. A gallows of this type was used for the execution of Robert Neil at Toronto's Don Jail on February 29, 1888: The old plan of a "drop" was discarded for a more merciful machine, by which the prisoner is jerked up from a platform on the ground level by a weight of 280 lbs, which is suspended by an independent rope pending the execution … At the words "Forgive us our trespasses," the executioner drove his chisel against the light rope that held the ponderous iron at the other end of the noose, and in an instant the heavy weight fell with a thud, and the pinioned body was jerked into the air and hung dangling between the rough posts of the scaffold. The hanging of Reginald Birchall in Woodstock, Ont. in November 1890 seems to be the last time a device of this kind was used. Radclive had first been exposed to executions as a Royal Navy seaman helping with shipboard hangings of pirates in the South China Sea, and it is possible he was trying to approximate something similar to hanging a man on a ship's yardarm. After Birchall's hanging, Radclive used the traditional long drop method, as did his successors. While hanging was a relatively humane method of execution under ideal conditions with an expert executioner, mistakes could and have happened. Condemned prisoners were decapitated by accident at Headingley Jail in Manitoba and Bordeaux Jail in Montreal, and a prisoner at the Don Jail in Toronto hit the floor of the room below and was strangled by the hangman. Some Canadian jails—such as those in Toronto, Whitby and Ottawa, Ontario; Headingley, Manitoba; and Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta—had permanent indoor execution facilities, but more typically offenders were hanged on a scaffold built for the occasion in the jail yard. Military prisoners sentenced to death under Canadian Military Law were shot by a firing squad. Public opinion Although reintroducing the death penalty in Canada is extremely unlikely, support for capital punishment is similar to its support in the United States, where it is carried out regularly in some states and is on the books in most states and on the federal level. While opposition to the death penalty increased in the 1990s and early 2000s, in recent years, Canadians have