Bajan killers lose motion

TWO Barbados killers, who had death warrants read to them last September 15, have both lost constitutional motions challenging their executions. Justice Lionel Greenidge, presiding in the Supreme Court of Barbados, dismissed the constitutional motions brought by Lennox Ricardo Boyce and Jeffrey Joseph last Wednesday challenging the decision of the Queen to hang them. But Justice Greenidge granted both killers a stay of execution of six weeks in the event they wanted to appeal his decision. The killers were represented by Alair Shepherd QC and Adrian King.

The death warrants were read to Boyce and Joseph for their execution at the Royal Barbados Prison on September 19, although they have petitions pending before the Inter-American Commission on 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 conviction and sentence on March 27, 2002. They appealed to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council against 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 and Tobago should have their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment, no such recommendation was made for the Barbados prisoners. Attorney Andrew Pilgrim, who initiated court action, 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. Two other men Romain Benn and Rodney Murray were convicted for Hippolyte’s death and were sentenced to 12 years imprisonment after pleading guilty to manslaughter. 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.