Two killers lose at Privy Council

Lester Pitman participated in the brutal killing of former BBC newsreader, Lynette Lithgow, 51, her mother Maggie Lee, 83, and brother-inlaw John Cropper, 59, in Cascade in 2001. Neil Hernandez killed Christine Henry and her sixyear- old son, Phillip, on a beach in Cumana, East Trinidad, in 2000.

Lawyers for the two, after several appeals, raised a novel point before the Board of the Judicial Committee last year, that it was cruel and unusual punishment to impose a sentence of death on someone if they were intellectually disabled or suffered from significant mental illness.

Pitman has an IQ of between 52 and 67.

Hernandez has an IQ of 57. The World Health Organisation classifies scores below 70 as constituting an intellectual disability. Pitman’s conviction was also contested on the grounds that it was on the basis of joint enterprise with others – a legal principle that the United Kingdom’s supreme court recently ruled had been wrongly interpreted for more than 30 years.

Pitman has had two appeals before the local appellate court and at the Privy Council with yesterday’s judgment being the final one in his case.

Since both Pitman and Hernandez had been on death row for more than five years, their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment by the local appellate court.

In Pitman’s case, it was ordered that he should not be released before the expiry of 40 years while Hernandez was ordered not to be released before 25 years.

Though they supplied reports to attest to the fact, Pitman’s lawyers no longer contended at his most recent Privy Council hearing that he was unfit to plead, insane or that his conviction ought to have been quashed because of diminished responsibility.

They instead argued that Pitman’s mental impairment was such that the pronouncement of a death sentence was unlawful and also submitted that the felony murder rule applied.

Pitman had been tried on joint responsibility as he was not alone in committing the Croppers’ murders. His co-accused was ordered to undergo a new trial which has yet to take place.In their reasons, the Privy Council judges held that it was not easy to see whatever the level of Pitman’s learning difficulties would have substantially diminished his responsibility for his actions.

But they did note that the death penalty was a cruel and unusual penalty which should be reserved for the worst cases.

They also held that to carry out the death penalty on persons whose mental condition meets the level required for that defence cannot be constitutionally justified.

The Privy Council, comprising Lady Hale, Lord Kerr, Lord Clarke, Lord Hughes, and Lord Toulson, took ten months to deliver the judgment.