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TrinidadSmiles1 |
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Post subject: Death Penalty in Trinidad & Tobago
 Posted: Jul 09, 2004 - 05:11 PM
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Joined: Jul 07, 2004
Posts: 3
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Hanging no magic solution
The vexed question of the death penalty appeared set to leave the people of T&T even more vexed after the Privy Council pronounced on it, again, on Wednesday.
In a previous decision, in the Roodal case, the tribunal held the mandatory death sentence for murder to be incompatible with the T&T Constitution.
This week, in the matter of “Charles Matthew vs The State,” the London-based justices reversed themselves.
Overruling the Roodal judgment as “wrongly decided,” they affirmed: “Henceforth the death sentence for murder will continue to be mandatory.”
Messrs Roodal and Matthew, the killers benefiting from these contradictory decisions, are even further privileged.
Neither of their cases will be brought back before a judge to determine whether the penalty should be hanging, or life imprisonment. Both have got life, a fate shared by all those sentenced to death and awaiting execution up to July 7.
It was a judgment of which the legendary King Solomon would have been proud.
“The same (Roodal/Matthew) considerations do not apply to persons convicted and sentenced after the date of this judgment, even though they might have been awaiting trial at the time of the Roodal decision,” the Privy Council said.
As five of the nine justices noted, “It is not the practice of their lordships to depart from a previous decision merely because the board as later constituted thinks it was wrongly decided.”
This was an extraordinary case. Attorneys General of T&T, Barbados and Jamaica jointly sought to have the Roodal ruling revisited, and the case reargued.
Not only did the Caribbean AGs move the lords to go against set practice, but they also got a nine-member panel to hear the post-Roodal arguments.
In its significance, their success was greater still. Even the four dissenting Law Lords conceded that the death penalty, though at least internationally controversial, is fully allowable under the T&T Constitution.
“It is accepted that the provisions of the Constitution now preclude such controversy in T&T,” they wrote.
Since Independence, the Privy Council board of British lords and others served as T&T’s “supreme court,” in their own clinical words. That status quo holds even as the Caribbean Court of Justice to replace it remains in gestation.
With this latest judgment, the Privy Council has given up a long-assumed prerogative to make life-and-death law for T&T, or a responsibility to provide “enlightened and forward-looking” leadership.
You deal with it, their lordships have said to T&T. Legislators may now derive from public opinion guidance in making a conscious and clear-cut affirmation of where this country stands.
Debate, as it should happen, will take place in a climate of high anxiety about crime, with much deeply held feeling that the certainty of their own death by hanging will deter and restrain today’s wanton killers.
Through the Attorney General, the Government has already welcomed the latest ruling, reading it as a newly unsheathed weapon in its anti-crime arsenal.
Carried out in the more equivocal legal circumstances of 1999, however, ten hangings did not prove to have a long-lasting deterrent effect.
As killings far outstrip detection and prosecution, and a distressing number of people accused of murder get to walk free, the public and politicians should know that hanging—in threat and reality—is no magic solution.
Moving beyond the Privy Council, the greater challenge remains to prevent crime, or to catch perpetrators, and effectively to prosecute them.
?2003-2004 Trinidad Publishing Company Limited
Designed by: Randall Rajkumar-Maharaj ? Updated daily by: Sheahan Farrell |
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supa |
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Post subject:
Posted: Jul 09, 2004 - 05:20 PM
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Joined: Mar 13, 2004
Posts: 209
Status: Offline
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since living in foreign, i cannot really condone the death penalty as a means to prevent heinous crimes. it may seem to be the ideal deterrent, but it is more suited to a "perfect" (non-existent) society where corruption of power never occurs.
we all know this has never happened (corruption of power) in our sweet sweet TnT. So, what about the probable/dubious cases where CITIZENS of TnT were put on death row and subsequently hanged/murdered/killed. Check out the gallows, it is truly a chilling, heinous place to visit.
As the article above says:
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Moving beyond the Privy Council, the greater challenge remains to prevent crime, or to catch perpetrators, and effectively to prosecute them.
Will having the death penalty slow crime?? indeed it has not....look for alternatives and jump out of the taliban regime's methods of dealing with criminals.
what is the difference between POLICE brutality and JUDICIAL brutality? i see little differences...just different actors to carry out the same sentences...
ez
supa
Moving beyond the Privy Council, the greater challenge remains to prevent crime, or to catch perpetrators, and effectively to prosecute them.
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