How death row mother’s ordeal came to an end — eventually

london: Indravani Ramjat-tan has been enjoying her first months of freedom after spending 12 years in prison — four and a half on death row — for the killing of her common-law husband.
Her release last February was the result of a landmark decision of the Trinidad Court of Appeal that recognised battered woman’s syndrome as a defence to a murder charge for the first time in the Caribbean. Ramjattan was convicted of murdering Alexander Jordan in 1991. At her trial no legal consideration was given to the eight years of physical and mental abuse that she endured at the hands of Jordan, with whom she had been forced to live since the age of 17. She tried to escape several times. The turning point came when he lined their children against the wall and asked each whether he should kill their mother. Ramjattan’s childhood sweetheart arrived shortly afterwards with a friend and beat Jordan to death. Ramjattan, who was not in the room at the time of the attack, was arrested for murder and imprisoned for four years without trial. In 1995 she was convicted, with her co-defendants, of joint enterprise to murder and sentenced to death.

In 1997 the London Panel of Solicitors took on her case pro bono and it was allocated to me. After the Privy Council’s rejection of our petition for special leave to appeal, the next step was a submission to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, one of the two main international human rights tribunals monitoring death penalty cases. As we prepared our submission, evidence of the severity of the abuse came to light. Based on this, Dr Nigel Eastman, a forensic psychiatrist and expert on battered woman’s syndrome, wrote that, as a result of the abuse, Ramjattan would have had “such an abnormality of the mind” that it would result in a “substantial impairment of mental responsibility.” A further petition was made to the Privy Council. We had to convince the court that the abuse and violation were so extreme that it was incumbent on the State to take this into account in assessing her culpability. On the basis of the new evidence, and Dr Eastman’s report, the Privy Council remitted Ramjattan’s case to the Court of Appeal in Trinidad. In October 1999 it overturned her murder conviction and sentenced her to five years for manslaughter. The eight and a half years she had already served did not count. With remission she served an additional three years and four months. Courtesy The Times. The author acted for Indravani Ramjattan while working as an assistant at Herbert Smith.