Angelina Napolitano

Early Life

Born in a rural town near Naples, Italy, Angelina Napolitano moved to Ontario with her husband, Pietro, in 1909, following a seven-year stay in New York City. They lived briefly in Thessalon, a sawmill town, before moving to Sault Ste Marie. The couple lived with their four children, all born in the Algoma District, Ontario. The eldest, Michael, was likely born in 1904. Amelia was born in 1905, Rafeala in 1906, and Pietro in 1908. The three youngest children were baptized together in 1909, in the Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie.

Marriage

Pietro Napolitano worked as a labourer; however, he was unable to earn enough money to attain his goal of building a house. Looking for additional income, Pietro repeatedly tried to force Angelina into prostitution. He also physically abused her. In November 1910, for example, Pietro stabbed Angelina repeatedly with a knife, disfiguring her face, neck and shoulder — scars she still bore at her murder trial. Pleading guilty, Pietro received a suspended sentence.

Murder

On the fateful day, Pietro came home after a night shift at the steel plant and threatened to beat or kill Angelina unless she earned money — by the time he awoke — by being “a bad woman.” After striking her sleeping husband several times with an axe, Angelina put the tool in the shed and sat for a while with her youngest child. She then told the man in the adjoining flat what she had done and waited for the police.

Trial

Angelina’s murder trial was held on 8-9 May 1911. Justice Byron Moffatt Britton presided over the case. Crown prosecutor Edmund Meredith presented nine witnesses. Only Angelina testified for the defence. Her attorney, Uriah McFadden, argued that she had been provoked into murder by her husband’s abuse. He emphasized the knife stabbing of the previous year. Judge Britton ruled a six-month-old assault did not constitute sufficient provocation. In his charge to the jury, Britton noted that a sleeping husband could not have provoked his wife. In an era before a history of abuse was admissible, his interpretation was neither extraordinary nor generous.

The jury convicted her, but recommended clemency. Judge Britton, however, sentenced her to hang, choosing an execution date (9 August) that would allow her time to give birth.

Reaction

The case prompted much debate in Canada and internationally. Angelina’s critics included a columnist in the Sault Star, who denounced her as yet another “hot-blooded” foreigner quick to use any weapon at hand to respond to “real or fancied wrongs.” Another argued that Angelina deserved to die because she was immoral, a reference to the fact that for a short period when her husband was out of town, she had taken on a male boarder.

Taking up Angelina’s cause, many wrote letters and signed petitions as part of a clemency campaign to have her sentence commuted to a prison term. Sympathetic writers urged federal Minister of Justice Allen B. Aylesworth to spare the life of an abused wife. A few demanded a full pardon. American and British feminists, whose suffrage activism had sharpened their political organizing skills, were especially vocal. By comparison, Canadian feminists were more reserved in their support. For example, Canada’s Dr. Helen MacMurchy, a physician and eugenicist, told Aylesworth, a personal friend, to consider commutation because the case had caused an “uproar” among working women and socialists alike. Overall, the presence of a transnational women’s movement brought sustained international attention to the case. The British journal Common Cause was among these feminist voices. The journal decried the “masculine” court for not recognizing that the beatings had constituted sufficient provocation and that Angelina had acted in self-defence.

Other female supporters turned Angelina into a courageous woman who had rid the world of a “wicked husband.” For example, in a letter addressed to Canada’s Minister of Justice, one English woman went so far as to call her a heroine who had carried out a “dreadful loathsome duty” because her act had “delivered of the race from loathsome ulcers.” She added: the “rut of immorality” was “a far worse crime than murder!” Such comments were informed by the sexual and racial politics of early feminism, which employed popular stereotypes of foreign men as predisposed to violence and sexual immorality, and foreign women as especially victimized.

Feminist groups such as the Toronto Suffrage Association (TSA) called for clemency on the grounds of saving Angelina’s unborn child from harm. This, too, reflected contemporary notions, namely that a mother’s intense agitated state could do psychological damage to the foetus. Every hour Angelina spent in “the condition of terror, anticipating her execution,” the TSA warned, would have a “deleterious” impact on the “unborn innocent child.” (The baby actually died a few weeks after birth.) Others, including a few men, offered an extreme version of the notion that pregnancy could produce an unbalanced emotional or mental state, arguing that Angelina’s pregnancy had made her temporarily insane.

Aftermath

The clemency campaign worked: on 14 July 1911, the federal cabinet commuted Angelina Napolitano’s death sentence to life imprisonment. A model prisoner, Angelina was paroled from Kingston Penitentiary 11 years later, on 30 December 1922. Afterward, she worked as a live-in domestic for Kingston’s Nickle family, who lived at 155 Earl Street and were prominent in legal circles. At the time of her death, on 4 September 1932, Angelina still resided at the Nickle home. She died of septic peritonitis following two operations at Kingston’s Hotel Dieu Hospital. While in prison, Angelina had tried to contact her children, who had been placed in foster homes. However, it is not clear that she ever reunited with them. Angelina is buried in St Mary’s Cemetery, a Roman Catholic cemetery in Kingston.

Cultural Productions

The story of Angelina inspired a play by Frank Canino called The Angelina Project, which has had numerous performances in North America. Similarly, Sergio Navarretta directed the award-winning, feature-length film, Looking for Angelina, produced by Platinum Image Film in 2005.