Law lords' absurdity

THE notorious Pratt and Morgan judgment of November 1993 indicated clearly that the Privy Council's law lords were determined to impose their abolitionist views on our sovereign country. Largely because of this ruling, the death penalty which our laws make mandatory for convicted murderers has been virtually suspended. Killers, many of them guilty of the most horrendous slaughter, have managed to escape the hangman by resorting to a variety of delaying tactics, including appeals to international human rights bodies, which carry the date of their execution beyond the five-year deadline set by Pratt and Morgan.

As if that was not enough, the law lords have since then delivered judgments in murder appeals which carry their anti-capital punishment crusade to a ridiculous and unacceptable level. The most recent of such rulings was Tuesday's decision by the law lords to reduce to a manslaughter conviction the death penalty imposed on Bimal Roy Paria who beat to death his former common-law wife Asha Arjoon, her mother Sita and her sister Anna in January 1998. Amazingly enough, the reason given by the law lords for commuting Paria's death sentence was the fact that the trial judge failed to put to the jury the evidence of Paria's good character! This pretext, in our view, is unbelievble and can only be explained by the law lords' repugnance for the death penalty and their determination to impose their personal abolitionist views upon us.

A man brutalises to death not only his ex-wife but also her mother and her sister and is convicted for their murder by a jury acting on the basis of abundant evidence. The law demands, without equivocation, that he be hanged by his neck until dead. This is the penalty that our society, by its statutes, imposes on convicted murderers. Now up come the law lords declaring that failure of the trial judge to take into account evidence of the killer's good character constituted such a grave prejudice against him that it requires a commutation of his sentence! Could you believe that? This decision by the Privy Council is nothing but an act of contempt for our country, our courts, our laws and our sense of justice. A man slaughters three women by beating them to death and the law lords are concerned not so much  with the evidence by which he was convicted but more about what he and his friends have to say about his "good character". The implications of this judgment are appalling. It now opens the way for brutal killers to produce evidence of their good character — evidence which the court would apparently have no choice but to accept — and then claim, "look, I'm a cool and peaceable fella, and therefore I must have lost control of myself to have committed such barbaric acts." And this pleading, it seems, should be enough to reduce the murder charge against them to manslaughter.

This absurd decision by the law lords should illustrate the urgency of abolishing murder appeals to the Privy Council and the need to get the Caribbean Court of Appeal in operation as soon as possible. The unbearable contumely of the law lords was aggravated on Monday by well known British Queen's Counsel Geoffrey Robertson who said at a function in Australia that the Caribbean Court was being established to make it easier to carry out the death penalty. The remark provoked the justified ire of West Indian Chief Justices attending the Commonwealth Law Conference, with Barbados CJ Sir David Simmons condemning it as "offensive, cheap and an affront to those involved in setting up the court". However well it might have served us in the past, our link with the Privy Council is now an embarrassing anachronism, a derogation on our sovereignty. Its insults now make the severing of this link an urgent necessity.