The Sentence of Death

Weekly Gleaner, The; North American ed. › July 31, 2009

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Summary

The recent rulings of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) on the mandatory death penalty continue the current trend towards limiting the application of the sentence of death. Already, in the Eastern Caribbean and Belize, the JCPC had ruled the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional. Similar rulings were expected in the trio of cases from Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, but whereas the JCPC ruled unanimously that in Jamaica it was unconstitutional, by a majority of five to four judges, it held that in Barbados and Trinidad, their constitutions preserved the death penalty.

Interestingly, the JCPC agreed with International Treaties on Human Rights, to which Caribbean territories are parties, that the death penalty amounted to cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and prohibited by the human rights clauses of the constitutions but, the majority held, preserved by the saving law clauses in Barbados and Trinidad. In Jamaica, the JCPC found that the attempt by the legislature to define killings into capital and non-capital murders was unconstitutional and a matter for the judiciary. From now, the task of imposing the death penalty will be a judicial function, rather than legislatively determined. The JCPC held: "To condemn a man to die without giving him the opportunity to persuade the court that this would in his case be disproportionate and inappropriate is to treat him in a way that no human being should be treated. There are no limits to the variety of circumstances which may lead a man to commit homicide. The crime of which he has been convicted may turn out to have been far more serious than he foresaw or contemplated."

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Extract

The Sentence of Death

THE TREND across the world is towards the elimination of the death penalty as judicial punishment. Just over 150 years ago, the sentence of death was available, nay mandatory, for 144 crimes including many petty offences. Since then, for most countries, murder is the only offence...

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