Oxford prof hits hanging

The report, “A Rare and Arbitrary Fate,” was due to be formally launched Wednesday at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine.

A statement issued beforehand said: “The existence of the mandatory death penalty appears likely to reduce rather than increase the chances of obtaining a murder conviction.”

The study was done on murders committed between 1998 and 2005 by Oxford criminologist Prof Roger Hood and Oxford visiting scholar Dr Florence Seemungal, who is a Trinidadian.

The duo found that under the mandatory death penalty, not only does Trinidad and Tobago have a very low rate of conviction for murders, but those persons who are eventually convicted may not truly comprise the worst cases.

People are more likely to be convicted for domestic killings as opposed to drug-related and gang-related murders, said the study.

In 82 percent of drug and gang-related murders, no suspect was even ever identified.

Out of all murders committed up to 2005, only one in 20 resulted in a conviction, while between 1998 and 2002 only 17 percent of murders resulted in a conviction.

“Domestic murders accounted for only 17 percent of all recorded murders but made up 52 percent of those convicted for murder and sentenced to death.”

Where both the killer and victim are of East Indian descent, the murder is more likely than, where both parties are of African descent, to be domestic murder.

“The odds of a murder conviction where both the victim and defendant were of East Indian origin were 3.8 times higher than where both parties were of African descent.”

Even so the chances of a conviction in a domestic case are not high.

The report added: “They are exceptionally low in cases arising from gang and drug-related killings which often involve assassinations and great cruelty.”

As a result there is much arbitrariness in which defendants are sentenced to death. “This means that a mandatory death sentence is applied inequitably, without consideration of the differences between murders and the persons convicted of them, and by no means always to the ‘worst of the worst’ cases.”