In the English-speaking Caribbean the death penalty for murder drifts slowly but inexorably into oblivion. Four death-row prisoners, one from Trinidad, two from Barbados and another from Jamaica, applied to the Privy Council, the final court of appeal in Caribbean jurisprudence, to have their death sentences lifted. Their argument was that there were mitigating factors in their cases which the islands' judges could not take into account because, once the juries had delivered guilty verdicts, the death penalty was mandatory.
The Privy Council - embodied exceptionally on this occasion in a panel of eight English law lords and one senior judge from Jamaica - ruled that, under the Jamaican constitution, hanging was cruel and degrading. That was not so under the Trinidadian
and Barbadian constitutions, the law lords ruled. However, they
decided that because, in a previous case, the Privy Council had reached the opposite conclusion for Trinidad and Tobago, those currently on death row in that country should not be hanged.
So 60 prisoners in Jamaica and 100 in Trinidad will escape the rope. It seems to me that in future the Privy Council will find it virtually impossible to uphold a sentence of execution in Trinidad, now that people in similar circumstances have been spared. The shadow of the gallows has not entirely departed from the Caribbean, but it has retreated by some distance. It is admirable that the law lords have put themselves in the vanguard of the movement against capital punishment even though hanging has enormous support among the Caribbean people. A campaigner against hanging in Trinidad was once stoned as he stood picketing alone on a day when several prisoners were executed. The police also turned on him and savagely beat him.
Several Caribbean governments are burning to abolish the Privy Council as the final court of appeal because of its liberal interpretation of the law. It would be replaced by a regional court of appeal, set up for the sole purpose of popping necks, as one former police commissioner in Trinidad described this barbarous act.
Let the Privy Council prevail, I say, along with the fine stock of British lawyers who defend the hapless poor of the Caribbean from barbarism. Despite promises to build anew, many of the old colonial institutions remain intact in the Caribbean. So will the Privy Council, I expect.
