THE ESCALATING CRIME WAVE in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, with traumatic murder rates of crisis proportion, has sent governments in both states to once again lull the public into thinking that popping the necks of convicted murderers
is an appropriate response.
Well-meaning as they are in going on the offensive against armed criminals, and murderers in particular, both Jamaica's Justice Minister A. J. Nicholson and Trinidad and Tobago's Attorney-General John Jeremie would be hard pressed to offer any empirical evidence to suggest that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder.
While they were sending new signals to expedite the hanging
process for death row prisoners, an international conference on the death penalty was taking place in Barbados last weekend.
The three-day event, jointly sponsored by the European Union, United Kingdom and Penal Reform International, involved leading lawyers, human rights advocates and penal reform specialists, including from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and the United States of America.
The Commonwealth Caribbean is said to be among the first 12 of about 40 countries with the highest rates of imprisonment. It also has the unflattering reputation of being the only region of the global community where all member states are constitutionally empowered to enforce the death penalty for murder.
With more than 700 murders in Jamaica for 2005 and more than 150 in Trinidad and Tobago – where kidnappings are also a nightmare – the governments are desperately shopping around for effective responses to the killers.
What has been the major barrier for the region's governments and stopped them from putting death row prisoners to swing from idle gallows is the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, which still remains (except for Guyana and, as of last month, Barbados) their court of last resort.
In talking tough about seeking ways to circumvent a Privy Council ruling in the Pratt and Morgan case of 12 years ago, Justice Minister Nicholson should be mindful against playing into the hands of his government's political opponents who remain opposed to scuttling links with the Privy Council in favour of accessing the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as Jamaica's final appellate institution.
Attorney-General Jeremie is in an even more precarious situation. Unlike his Jamaican counterpart, he has support from a parliamentary opposition that is even more gungho about enforcing the death penalty. However, he is aware that Basdeo Panday and his United National Congress MPs are in no mood at this time to enable any constitutional amendment to overcome restrictions from Privy Council rulings for the execution of death row prisoners.
Consequently, when Jeremie threatened, as he did in parliament last week, to "resist with every resource of the state" decisions of the Privy Council to commute to life imprisonment the sentence of death row inmates, he must know that it smacks of political bravado, or of someone fearfully whistling in the dark.
He announced the resumption of hanging after an absence of eight years and with the intention to execute all 78 prisoners on death row, starting with the planned execution tomorrow of condemned inmate Lester Pitman.
(On Friday lawyers for Pitman were arguing in court for a stay of execution.)
But Jeremie runs the danger of repeating the outrageous precedent set by former Trinidad and Tobago Attorney-General Keith Sobian on July 14, 1994.
That was a "red letter" day in the history of judicial executions in this region when death row inmate Glen Ashby was executed even as an appeal against the dismissal of a constitutional motion was before the Trinidad and Tobago Court of Appeal.
Ashby's execution became the subject of an independent inquiry, organised by the then Barbados-headquartered Caribbean Human Rights Network (Caribbean Rights). The report on the findings was made public and should be revisited by the current attorney-general in Port-of-Spain.
The state cannot expediently suspend the constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right of even a death row inmate to a fair trial – as happened in the now oft referenced Glen Ashby case – without being justly accused of an act of grave injustice, driven by a desire of a life for a life.
Caught up in the emotionalism of "hang them" from the pro-death penalty advocates in the face of incidents of murder, Barbados recently enacted legislation to constitutionally overcome a Privy Council ruling to make the death penalty mandatory.
It was one of the issues examined at the recently held conference on the death penalty at which participants strategised on how best to continue the battle for abolition of the death penalty in this and other regions of the world.
