‘Juries not likely to convict’

This was the argument put forth by the British High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago, Tim Stew, as he made the case against this country’s death penalty law.

“The research that we’ve seen here, carried out by universities and so on, suggests that actually, juries are half as likely to find somebody guilty if they know that the only sentence the judge can deliver is the death penalty.

Whereas if there is a range of options; long-term imprisonment and so on, to obviously take that person out of society, they are more likely to convict the person in front of them.

“The obvious consequence of that is that you could well have people who should be in prison, who should’ve been convicted, who are walking free, walking the streets. Naturally, that is a concern of mine, that actually when people in this country are calling for the swift delivery of justice, that actually the mandatory nature of the death penalty may be making that worse, not better,” Stew said.