LIFE OR DEATH

Deeply concerned about the surge in homicides, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley announced recently that the Government has asked former Attorney General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, to consult on measures to reintroduce the hangman in the shortest possible time under. It was during Maharaj’s tenure that hangings - the execution of the notorious Dole Chadee and eight members of his gang in 1999 - were last carried out in the country.

Maharaj, who has agreed to assist the Government free of charge, has since recommended a fast-track mechanism for murder cases to be tried all the way to the Privy Council so that hangings can be resumed. Maharaj, who has long advocated that the death penalty be reinstated, recommended, in part, that a Case Management Unit be established, comprising representatives from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Commissioner of Prisons, Supreme Court Registry, and Ministries of National Security and Foreign Affairs.

The unit, he said, would examine the cases of Death Row prisoners who are close to the five-year Pratt and Morgan limitation period.

Some 36 convicted prisoners are currently on Death Row in the nation’s prisons. Maharaj has also made it clear that the Government must have the will to reintroduce the death penalty.

Attorney Keith Scotland agreed, saying the death penalty remains on the statute books under the Offences Against Persons Act and should be exercised.

“It, therefore, means that the collective wisdom of our representatives which are to represent the will and aspirations of the people have insisted that the death penalty remains on the law books in spite of developments in other parts of the world in terms of the degrees of murder,” Scotland said on Wednesday. “It is the law and ought to be implemented until such time as the Parliament or the people see it fit to have a change.” South-based attorney and former Princes Town MP Subhas Panday believes that governments have been dragging their feet on bringing back capital punishment.

“There is no will to carry out the law and successive governments have been making excuses all the time,” he said on Friday in a Sunday Newsday interview.

“It says to me that the they are anti-hanging but say they are interested in hanging and that Pratt and Morgan is preventing them from so doing.” Moral issue vs the law Saying he does not have a moral position on the death penalty, Panday insisted: “It is the law.

Father (Joseph) Harris (Roman Catholic Archbishop) has a moral position but my view is that it is time for the implementation of the death penalty.” Indeed, Harris has sought to debunk the view that capital punishment is the panacea for ridding the country of the spate of violent crimes. The archbishop’s position came last December in response to calls by one of his subordinates, Fr Ian Taylor, to resume hangings as a deterrent to crime. During a Saturday night mass at St Charles RC Church, Taylor had urged that killers be hanged given the high level of violence in TT.

Of Taylor’s call, Harris had said: “What was said goes totally against what the church stands for.” Harris said the poor criminal detection rate also posed a challenge.

“You have to find the criminals and if our conviction rate is three to five per cent, who yuh hanging?” he asked. “Do we want to run the risk of hanging people for crime they didn’t do so that it would look good?” Describing it as “barbaric,” attorney and social activist Hazel Thompson-Ahye argued that the death penalty had no place in a civilised, progressive society.

“I am so sure, today, the death penalty is so wrong,” she said.

“It is really a very negative way of dealing with crime. It is based on retribution, waging a vendetta against the criminals. Do them because they have done us. When you have a negative response, you are going to get negative results.” Thompson-Ahye, a proponent of restorative justice, lamented that TT was a punitive society.

“We still cannot get out of the corporal punishment of children.

All of these things are connected.

We feel we must beat children.

We feel we must hang criminals,” she said, adding that many punitive measures were taken against the disadvantaged in the society.

Thompson-Ahye described as “scandalous” the fact that the Ministry of National Security’s allocations in the national budget over the years, have exceeded that of the Ministry of Education. She said the focus must be on tackling the socio-economic conditions which give rise to crime in the first place.” “There is too much inequality in the society,” she observed.

“Don’t think for a moment that when we talk about the obscene bonuses and gratuities that we give to the CEOs, even when they are in failing businesses, that it is lost on the poor.” Thompson-Ahye asked: “When people read about the millions of dollars that were paid to private attorneys and the DPP’s office is being starved of resources, we really have to ask ourselves, are we really serious about fighting crime?” She said society should be focusing on dealing with its inequalities.

“We speak about spending $25,000 a month on keeping an inmate in Remand Yard and where is that money going? she asked.

Taking issue with Fr Taylor’s call for the return of the hangman, Thompson-Ahye said: “I don’t know how he could talk in favour of the death penalty because there is a finality which denies the possibility of conversion. No matter how heinous the crime the criminal has committed, that person still remains a child of God. That person is still redeemed in the blood of Christ, especially in this Easter season.” Thompson-Ahye also said attention should be paid to alleviating what she called the structural violence meted out to the poor in relation to housing, healthcare and other areas White collar crime, she insisted, also must be tackled aggressively.

Last week, Chairman of the United Kingdom All Party Parliamentary Group of the Abolition of the Death Penalty Mark Pritchard on a visit to Port of Spain, warned against using the death penalty as a quick fix to crime and violence.

Rather, the anti-death penalty advocate said fixing the system must be handled in a “calm, objective, evidence-driven manner” before capital punishment can be effectively carried out.

Despite the misgivings of abolitionists, some of whom have been passionate in their condemnation of the issue, protagonists are adamant that it is necessary to combat the worrying surge in murders.

“There are too many senseless killings in the country especially within recent times and the killers are seeing that they have no consequences to face,” said retired prisons commissioner Cipriani Baptiste, who presided over the execution of the Chadee gang at the Port-of-Spain jail, some 18 years ago. While he believes that the death penalty will not be a deterrent for would-be killers, Baptiste, who served as prisons commissioner from 1993 to 2001, suggested that restorative justice “in a general sense,” can be a talking point as deliberations on capital punishment continue.

Senior Counsel Israel Khan insisted that the death penalty must be carried out for first degree murders. “I believe that murders should be categorised into first, second and third degree.

I reserve, at this point in time in our history, the death penalty for first degree murders - that is atrocious or vicious murder,” he told Sunday Newsday. “For example, if a man takes a fee to kill a man and he wants to receive a fair trial and he has lost all of his appeals, he should be executed because life is sacrosanct and no one should take anybody’s life. You have forfeited the right to live.” Khan said while hangings may not necessarily reduce the murder rate “it gives satisfaction to the human part of us that wants revenge for killing someone.” “It gives a sort of psychological satisfaction because you have forfeited your right and you should be executed,” he added.

Attorney Martin George agreed.

“I am fully supportive of the view taken that once this is the law on the books of Trinidad and Tobago, then it ought to be implemented and we ought to make use of it as part of the arsenal of the legislative structure of the country,” he said.

“Because if we reach to a point where the population, for whatever reason, decides and is able to prevail upon the Legislature to change the law that the death penalty is no longer part of our legislative framework, then that is a different issue, but once it remains the law, then I am of the view that we ought to take all measures and all steps to implement it.” Saying his view was not based on emotion, George said: “It is simply a view that says that the death penalty is the law and it ought to be implemented until it changes. If it changes then we have a different paradigm. But as it stands, that remains the law of the land.” Welcoming Maharaj’s input in fast-tracking the process, George said the argument about whether the death penalty impacted crime was a “spurious and speculative debate. Because it is very clear and obvious that the death penalty deters at least one person. The person who is hung. He will never go out and murder anybody again. So, it is clearly a deterrent for him if nobody else.” Regarding Pritchard’s view that capital punishment should not be seen as a quick fix to violent crime, George said: “I think those who look at it that way, they are mistaken.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with using that as one of the tools in our arsenal in our legislative framework to deal with the scourge of crime in TT. Of course, It is not that it is a cure all or magic bullet. “ George also expressed the view that there are many convicted people who have not committed crimes and by the same token, those who have gone free but committed the act.