‘Murder — order of the day’

QUEEN’S COUNSEL Kent Pantry, Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in Jamaica, said yesterday that murder was the order of the day in his country. Addressing the Privy Council as to why the death penalty should remain as the law, Pantry said there were at least three murders a day on his island. He said there was wanton disregard for order and the police were not immune to such killings. Pantry said there was a rapid  increase in murders in Jamaica in the last 20 years. “In the 1970’s, there has been an increasing number of murders, political and otherwise, and committed by gangs. There is evidence that convicted persons kill again. I think that persons convicted of murder forfeit their right to life. The death penalty is the appropriate sentence for murder,” Pantry argued.

Pantry said the classification of murder under the Offences against the Person Act was a careful decision of his Parliament and that some types of murder  “are by their very nature, so egregious and so damaging to society that, regardless of personal or mitigating circumstances, the death penalty is the appropriate punishment.” Jamaica’s Solicitor General Michael Hylton QC pointed out that although the law was changed in 1992, the mandatory death sentence still applies to persons convicted of murder. “No new sentence was created or imposed for such murders. Rather, the same sentence is there as was prescribed in the 1864 Act. The effect of the 1992 amendment was to continue in effect, the law as it applied to such murders before 1992.” He continued, “It is submitted that the plain answer to the relevant inquiry is that the mandatory death penalty is saved. The 1992 Act effected no change either as regards the offence itself or, in the case of murders now classified as capital murders and murders, which by virtue of section 3 (1) (a) require the imposition of the death sentence.”