Compensation for killer

ARE WOMEN who are convicted of murder really placed on Death Row? We ask the question because of Friday’s unprecedented decision of a High Court judge to grant a female murderer monetary compensation for having been kept on Death Row longer than she should have been. In the first place, it must be recognised that this country has never executed a woman found guilty of murder, inspite of the mandatory death penalty imposed on her by our courts and regardless of the heinous nature of her crime. It is a matter of historical record that none of our past governments, going back to colonial times, ever had the taste, desire or perhaps the political courage to hang female murderers. This fact may or may not be grounds for male killers to add gender discrimination to their constitutional petitions, but so far it has apparently not occurred to them. In any case, if we do not hang women what really is the meaning of Death Row to them?

In the second place, the so-called Death Row for women is certainly not the Death Row in which men convicted of murder are confined. As far as we know, female murderers are placed in the women’s section of the Golden Grove Prison, and even if the cells in which they are kept are dubbed “Death Row” there is little or no difference from the rest of the prison. However, Death Row for male murderers at the Port-of- Spain State Prison has had a far more sinister reality. Last Wednesday, Newsday readers were given a graphic description of conditions there in our report on the constitutional motion brought by Boodram Bedessie who has spent a record of 18 years on Death Row. Because of his proximity to the gallows, Bedessie said he was able to hear the screams of men being hanged. He recalled hearing other Death Row inmates, Fazal Mohammed and Gayman Jurysingh, screaming and weeping when death warrants were read to them. “When the death warrants were read to these prisoners, I would witness the preparation of the gallows for their execution. The action of the authorities made me fearful that the executive could have executed me at any time, notwithstanding that I had been incarcerated in excess of ten years.” Eventually, in January 1994, Bedessie became one of those prisoners whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment following the Privy Council’s Pratt and Morgan decision.

As a result of all of this, we are hardpressed to understand the reasoning behind Justice Peter Jamadar’s decision to award monetary compensation to Angela Ramdeen who had been kept by the State a year and ten months after the Pratt and Morgan ruling came into effect. We can see why the judge ruled that the death sentence imposed on her cannot be legally carried out but we fail to see what extra suffering or hardship Ramdeen could have endured as a result of her overstay in the “Death Row” at Golden Grove that would entitle her to monetary compensation. To begin with, she must have known that history was on her side and that, even without Pratt and Morgan,  she would not have been executed. So she could not have felt the mental anguish that Bedessie did, he being in the real Death Row, next to the gallows. And what was the “breach of fundamental rights” claimed by this woman who killed two of her stepchildren and buried their bodies at the back of her home at Carlsen Field? By law, Ramdeen should have been executed, but she was saved from the hangman by history, precedent and the Privy Council. How could keeping her somewhat longer on this so-called Death Row at Golden Grove be a breach of her fundamental rights? And even if the judge was persuaded by this purely legalistic argument, where was the obligation to grant her monetary compensation?