2 Bajan killers to hang Tuesday

TWO CONVICTED Barbados killers who lost their appeals in the Privy Council in July, will hang on Tuesday. One of the killers asked that his worldly possessions be given to the people of Grenada if he is hanged. The death warrants were read to Lennox Ricardo Boyce and Jeffrey Joseph on Thursday for their execution at the Royal Barbados Prison on Tuesday morning, although they have petitions pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Attorney-at-law Andrew Pilgrim, who was one of the lawyers who represented the condemned men in the Privy Council, is leading the effort to save their lives.

Pilgrim said on Thursday that he was surprised that the Barbados government went ahead and read death warrants when it had not allowed Boyce and Joseph to exhaust remedies at international bodies to which Barbados is a signatory.  Joseph and Boyce have appeals pending before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a body whose compulsory jurisdiction Barbados accepted in 2000. They were found guilty on February 2 2001 in the Supreme Court of Barbados of  the 1999 murder of Marquelle Hippolyte. The Court of Appeal of Barbados dismissed their appeals against the conviction and sentence on March 27 2002. They appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council against the sentence only because the Law Lords had ruled in November 2003 that the mandatory death sentence was unconstitutional.

Boyce and Joseph, along with Trinidadian Charles Matthew and Jamaican Lambert Watson were respondents in an appeal in which the governments of Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica petitioned the Privy Council to have the mandatory death penalty returned as the law in the Caribbean. The appeals were heard in London in March and on July 7, the Privy Council by a 5-4 majority, ruled that the mandatory death penalty should remain as the law in TT and Barbados. While the Law Lords recommended that everyone on death Row in Trinidad should have their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment, no such recommendation was made for the Barbados prisoners. Pilgrim said when death warrants were first read to Boyce and Joseph last year they had not even gone before the Privy Council. The Judicial Committee, in the case of Darrin Thomas v Cipriani Baptiste in 1998, ruled that it would be wrong to hang someone who has a petition pending before international human rights bodies.

Newsday was informed that a priest visited Joseph and Boyce on Thursday. He revealed that prison authorities are now in possession of a letter which authorises them to give all of Joseph’s worldly possessions to Grenada if he is executed. The last time a hanging took place in the Caribbean was in June 1999 when Dole Chadee and his gang of eight were executed at the Port-of-Spain State Prison.