Only four men under the sentence of death at Her Majesty's Prison could still face the hangman's noose, according to records kept by the Office of the Attorney General. Edwin Bauld Jr., Renaldo Bonaby, Mario Flowers and Wilfred McPhee were all sentenced to death in 2010. Bauld and McPhee were convicted of the October 2007 murder of 28-year-old Police Corporal Edison Bain. Bonaby was sentenced to death for the December 6, 2006 murder of Philip Gaitor Jr. And Mario Flowers was sentenced to death for the December 29, 2007 murder of Ramos Williams, a policeman who was killed in the line of duty. The other men under the sentence of death -- with the exception of one -- were sentenced more than five years ago, according to the information. Ernest Lockhart was sentenced on July 24, 2006, nearly five years ago, for the murder of Caxton Smith, which took place on June 8, 1999. The Privy Council ruled in 1993 in the Jamaican case of Earl Pratt and Ivan Morgan that it would be cruel and inhumane for prisoners to wait more than five years on death row. At least four men are still awaiting re-sentencing because a 2006 Privy Council ruling determined that the mandatory death sentence was unconstitutional, according to the Office of Attorney General's records. Dolan Bethel, Peter Cash, Ervin Brown and Leslie Webster must all be re-sentenced, according to the information provided. Some of them have been under the sentence of death since the 1990s. According to the AG's records, nine people are under the sentence of death in The Bahamas. Up until recently, Anatole McQuay was also under the sentence of death, but he was re-sentenced to life. McQuay was sentenced to death on April 1, 1996 for the 1994 murder of Gurth Dean during an attempted armed robbery of his meat shop on Carter Street. At the time of his trial, the death penalty was the only sentence available to the judge. Until recently, Maxo Tido and Godfrey Sawyer were also under the sentence of death. But, as has been widely reported, the Privy Council recently quashed Tido's death sentence, saying that the murder of his 16-year-old victim did not fall into the category of 'worst of the worst' or 'rarest of the rare' and therefore did not warrant the death penalty. That ruling came just over five years after Tido was sentenced to death.  Under the 1993 ruling in Pratt and Morgan, he would have escaped the gallows in any event. In April, the Court of Appeal eliminated the possibility of Sawyer facing the death penalty for the shooting death of Sterling Eugene when it quashed his murder conviction. However, the court ordered that Sawyer face a retrial on the charge of manslaughter. Then Senior Justice Anita Allen sentenced Sawyer, 29, to death on November 9, 2009 for the murder of Eugene, a Quality Discount Store employee killed during an armed robbery.  Allen is now the president of the Court of Appeal. On Friday, justices of the Court of Appeal said in a ruling that Allen failed to a give an "objective" summary of the evidence during Sawyer's murder trial. The Court of Appeal was of the view that Allen "failed to achieve a fair balance in her analysis on the evidence relevant to intention [to kill], which must be proved to support a murder charge." Last year, the government was preparing to read Sawyer a death warrant. The four men sentenced to death last year all have appeals pending before the Court of Appeal, according to Nassau Guardian records. If they lose their cases, they could still appeal to the Privy Council and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The long appeals process without any time limits means that the five-year period for executions set by the Pratt and Morgan ruling often runs out. If the Court of Appeal affirms a death sentence, there is no timeframe for a person to appeal to the Privy Council and the convict often does not until a death warrant is read. A death penalty bill promised by the government will address categories of murder. The Nassau Guardian understands that it will not address timeframes. "Unless you put timeframes in place you're only spinning tops in the mud," one judicial source said.

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