by ANTOINETTE CONNELL in TRINIDAD

THE BARBADOS GOVERNMENT'S LAWYER yesterday conceded that he could find no grounds for not commuting Jeffrey Joseph's and Lennox Boyce's death sentences.

"Are there any grounds for not commuting, given the lapse of five years and four months?" asked president of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), Michael de la Bastide.

"On the facts I can see none," replied Queen's Counsel Roger Forde, who has been leading Government appeal on a decision to commute the death sentences.

On that note, Queen's Counsel Alair Shepherd, representing Joseph and Boyce, said the issues raised in the appeal were of great academic importance but could not result in the death penalty being revisited upon the two men.

Forde had insisted that a mere lapse of time, five years as set out in the Pratt & Morgan ruling of the Privy Council in London, was not enough to be considered inhumane treatment. He was concluding his arguments as to why the seven-member CCJ should reverse the decision of the Barbados Court of Appeal which substituted life imprisonment instead of death on the two men last year.

He said that when Government amended the Constitution to give the Governor-General authority to set a time limit for appeals outside of Barbados, it was done in relation to Pratt & Morgan.

It was not a direct response to the Jamaican case Neville Lewis v. Attorney-General which, according to the Privy Council, entitled a condemned man to a hearing before an international body and for the state not to execute him while an appeal was pending, he added. Forde argued that the amendment was necessary in Pratt & Morgan circumstances in which international bodies delayed their response to petitions causing them to go beyond the five-year limit.

But he was not sure whether it was by sheer coincidence that the amendment came after the Lewis decision. He said that while there was a reference in Hansard to both cases during the amendment, Pratt & Morgan was the driving force behind the amendment.

Forde also contended that at the time the Court of Appeal gave its ruling, Joseph and Boyce had not reached the five-year threshold to begin considering that hanging them would be inhumane. The court speculated as to what would happen.

He urged the court to adopt the view found in another decision that unless courts moved away from commuting to life, there would be no incentive for the international bodies to respond in a timely fashion.

In response, Shepherd said the amendment gave the condemned men the right to appeal to an international body within a certain time limit. The sentence of the court could still be carried out, so the rush to get within Pratt & Morgan was no longer an issue at the time of the amendment, therefore it would have to relate to Lewis.

He asked the court to make it clear that while the Mercy Committee could go ahead and meet while an appeal was pending, it should not unless it was contemplating commuting the death sentences.

Please see also Page 21.