The debate on hanging

More hangings followed on July 28, 1999, when Anthony Briggs and Wenceslaus James were hanged.

The events sparked major controversy locally and abroad, with criticisms from several international agencies and individuals lobbying for the abolition of the death penalty. The outcry was especially strident in the case of James who had an appeal pending before the Organisation of American States (OAS) at the time of his execution.

When those executions were carried out, Basdeo Panday was Prime Minister, Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj was Attorney General and Kamla Persad-Bissessar, now this country’s Prime Minister, was Legal Affairs Minister.

Now with calls for the resumption of hangings, led by Works and Transport Minister Austin Jack Warner, this country is once again caught up in the emotive and contentious debate about capital punishment.

As Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar pointed out at last week’s post-Cabinet briefing, death by hanging as punishment for murder is the law in this country. That has been the case since 1925 under the Offences Against the Person Act which stipulates death by hanging as the only applicable punishment for the crime of murder.

According to Section 4 of the Offences Against the Person Act (Chapter 11:08) “Every person convicted of murder shall suffer death” and the Criminal Procedure Act (Chapter 12:02) in section 57 provides: “(1) Every warrant for the execution of any prisoner under sentence of death shall be under the hand and seal of the President, and shall be directed to the Marshal, and shall be carried into execution by such Marshal or his assistant at such time and place as mentioned in the warrant; and the warrant shall be in the form set out as Form A in the Second Schedule …”

Form A states that the person involved has been sentenced to be “hanged by the neck until he be dead”. The President of the Republic, in signing the warrant, authorises the execution in that manner.

However, while hanging is still legal in this country, recent calls for the death penalty to be enforced come at a time when there is a strong global movement for its abolition. In fact, the movement for the abolition of capital punishment began as far back as the 18th century with the writings of Montesquieu and Voltaire and has been gaining momentum since then.

Some of the first countries to abolish capital punishment included Venezuela (1863), San Marino (1865), and Costa Rica (1877). Today, more than half the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty either by law or through practice.

Since 2000, Chile, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro and Turkey have joined the list of abolitionist countries. In the United Kingdom, it was abolished in 1971; France abolished it in 1981. Canada abolished it in 1976. In 1977, the United Nations General Assembly affirmed in a formal resolution that throughout the world, it is desirable to “progressively restrict the number of offences.

At present, in the United States, 15 states and the District of Columbia have banned capital punishment.

The latest country to abolish the death penalty for all crimes was Togo, on June 23, 2009. Europe is today the only region in the world where the death penalty is no longer applied. All the Council of Europe’s 47 member states have either abolished capital punishment or instituted a moratorium on executions.

According to Amnesty International, a human rights NGO, the death sentence is retained in only 58 countries at present while nearly two-thirds of the countries in the world have either abolished it or have not used it for at least ten years Last year, death sentences were carried out in 18 countries where 714 people were executed. Iran topped the chart with 388 executions, followed by Iraq at 120, Saudi Arabia with 69 and the US at 52. The NGO alleges that thousands of death sentences were carried out in China, which refused to divulge the figures.

However, the English-speaking Caribbean has remained largely unaffected by that abolitionist trend. In December 2008, this country along with Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, voted against a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions. The English-speaking Caribbean made up almost a quarter of the countries who voted against the resolution.

Still, executions have become increasingly rare in this part of the world, with the last carried out in the Bahamas in 2000. Support for the death penalty in the region is high, however, and death sentences are still being handed down. This is taking place against the backdrop of a high and increasing crime rate in several countries in the region where the widely held view is that executions are an effective method of crime control.

In November 1993, in the case of Pratt and Morgan, two Jamaican killers, the London-based Privy Council ruled that “in any case in which execution is to take place more than five years after sentence there will be strong grounds for believing that the delay is such as to constitute inhuman or degrading punishment or other treatment” and recommended “commutation to life imprisonment”.

As a result of that ruling, in August 2008, 53 people on death row in this country, had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment because they were not executed within the five-year period. At present there are 33 condemned prisoners on death row, including one woman.

Since its establishment, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) has been caught up in the ongoing death penalty debate in the region, with opponents saying the court is an answer to regional governments’ determination to bypass the rulings of the Privy Council that have made carrying out the death penalty a difficult undertaking.

The first established death penalty laws date as far back as the 18th Century BC in the Code of King Hammaurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes. The death penalty was also part of the 14th Century BC’s Hittite Code; in the seventh Century BC’s Draconian Code of Athens, which made death the only punishment for all crimes; and in the fifth Century BC’s Roman Law of the 12 Tablets. Death sentences were carried out by such means as crucifixion, drowning, beating to death, burning alive, and impalement.

In the tenth Century AD, hanging became the usual method of execution in Britain. In the following century, William the Conqueror would not allow persons to be hanged or otherwise executed for any crime, except in times of war. This trend would not last, for in the 16th Century, under the reign of Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed. Some common methods of execution at that time were boiling, burning at the stake, hanging, beheading, and drawing and quartering. Executions were carried out for such capital offences as marrying a Jew, not confessing to a crime, and treason.