UK Prof: Death penalty fails

His remarks came on Wednesday at the launch of a report by Hood and Trinidadian visiting scholar to Oxford University, Florence Seemungal, held at the JFK Lecture Theatre, University of the West Indies, St Augustine.

“At the end of a lengthy and expensive process, very few mandatory death sentences have been upheld,” he remarked, “and the prospects of conviction are very tiny indeed.” Noting a rise in murders from 171 in 2002 to 387 in 2005, the latter being equivalent to 30 murders per 100,000 people, Hood said this “enormous number” was a “terrible problem” for a small island.

The TT murder-rate is 19 times that of the UK and 16 times that of Canada.

This is the first study done in Trinidad and Tobago, and likely in the Caribbean, he said, and it was supported by the European Commission, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and NGOs Penal Reform International and the Death Penalty Project.

Hood said the report had found that out of 633 killings from 1998 to 2002, only five percent of these cases had secured a conviction for murder, and 17 percent for manslaughter. The rest were acquitted.

Even more startling was Hood’s revelation that of the gang-related killings within the 633 murders, only one percent resulted in a murder conviction and one percent in a manslaughter conviction. In 82 percent of gang-killings, police did not even have an initial suspect to charge, he added.

For all types of murders, said Hood, only five percent are likely to result in a murder conviction. He spelt out the trend from 1998 to 2002, saying: “As murders rose, prosecutions fell and convictions fell.”

While there was much arbitrariness in which criminal got a conviction for murder, Hood listed several factors which increased the chances of a case to result in a murder conviction. People killing in domestic disputes were five times more likely to be convicted of murder than a stranger killing someone in an altercation. A case involving an East Indian killer and East Indian victim was four times more likely to be convicted of murder than an African killing an African, apparently because East Indian killings were more likely to be domestic where the parties were all commonly known, while African killers were more likely to be involved in secretive gang- and drug-related killings. A killer with a confederate was six times more likely to be convicted of murder than a lone killer.

Hood concluded that the system of a mandatory death penalty is not working equitably in Trinidad and Tobago.