Insult by Law Lords

LET US begin this editorial by stating our belief that the majority of our citizens would want to see the death penalty retained for the crime of murder. This has been the finding not only of the Prescott Committee which examined the issue of capital punishment some years ago, but even more recently, a reflection of popular opinion expressed in a number of public consultations held by former Attorney General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj. With the current state of violence and wanton killing in our society, we believe that view on the execution of murderers will now be more strongly held than ever.

Over the last ten years, however, the British Privy Council, retained as TT’s final court of appeal after independence, has sought to impose their abolitionist will on our country by a string of judgments, starting with their infamous ruling in the Pratt and Morgan case as a result of which more than 100 convicted killers who had spent more than five years on death row had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. As a result of these judgments, the British Law Lords made it virtually impossible for the death penalty to be carried out on convicted murderers, inspite of the fact that our laws required it. What the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has been doing, in effect, is the rewriting of our common law to suit their personal rejection of capital punishment. On Thursday, in a 3-2 majority judgment, the Law Lords took their campaign a step further by throwing out the mandatory death penalty which has been on our statute books since time immemorial. Declaring that it breached the principle of the separation of powers, the Privy Council has now placed the sentencing of convicted murderers squarely on the shoulders of the trial judge who may or may not send guilty persons to the gallows.

We do not want to argue with the outcome of this particular judgment, since it introduces, in effect, the categorising of the crime of murder and the penalty each conviction may deserve — which, in fact, was one of the Prescott Committee’s recommendations and also the subject of proposals by the former UNC Attorney General. However, we find it offensive that the British Privy Council should again be so presumtuous as to be rewriting our laws. We consider this an affront to our sovereignity;  changing or making new laws to regulate our affairs must be our exclusive business, not that of the British Privy Councillors. In this context, it is a relief to note the strong disagreement expressed by the two dissenting Law Lords who apparently saw no abrogation of the separation of powers principle in the mandatory death sentence as they held it quite proper for the legislature to prescribe the sentence to be imposed on any convicted person. The crucial point about all of this, of course, is that the will and wishes of our people should prevail and the evolution of our society should take its own self-dictated course. It is unfortunate that the legislation proposed by former AG Maharaj which would have obviated the designs of the Law Lords was not supported by the PNM then in Opposition. Now, ironically enough, the situation has come full circle. The antics of the Privy Council dramatise the need for us to have the Caribbean Court of Appeal in operation as quickly as possible. But the PNM government’s effort to achieve this has run into the UNC Opposition’s non-cooperation. Such is the nature of our politics where the people’s will plays second fiddle.