Privy Council Rejected Argument Death Penalty Was Unconstitutional in 1995

Tue, Aug 30th 2011, 02:46 PM

Amid an escalating murder rate, the 2006 Privy Council decision that eliminated the mandatory death penalty for murder convicts has been the subject of much debate. However, few can recall that the Privy Council in 1995 rejected the argument that the mandatory death penalty was unconstitutional.

In 2008, Dame Joan Sawyer commented on the effect of the 2006 decision.  She said, "As far as society was concerned the conviction was valid.  We now have to come back to these cases more than 10 years after the Privy Council declared the mandatory death penalty constitutional in Larry Raymond Jones.  The system cannot withstand these vicissitudes."

Jones, who was convicted of a drug-related hit, was released from prison in 2007 during a re-sentencing hearing which was held in the Supreme Court to comply with the Privy Council's current position on capital punishment. He was among 10 convicts released on re-sentencing because the 2006 landmark decision invalidated their death sentences.

The consolidated appeals of Larry Raymond Jones, Peter Meadows, Anthony Neely, Jeremiah Poitier, Arnold Heastie and Nekita Hamilton against the constitutional validity of the mandatory death sentence led to a decision by authorities to suspend hangings pending a determination on the issue.  The proceedings began on June 21, 1989, but the Privy Council did not make its final judgment until April 3, 1995.

In the 1995 case, lawyers for the appellants based their argument on the wording of section 312 of the Penal Code.  They submitted that the words "liable to suffer death" imported a discretion in the judge to pass some lesser sentence.  The Court said that it was "inconceivable that such a radical change in the law as the abolition of the death penalty for murder would have been enacted by something other than clear and express words rather than the ambiguous terms of section 312."

In its 2006 decision, a differently constituted court that heard the appeals of Trono Davis and Forrester Bowe Jr. found that the mandatory death penalty was considered cruel and inhuman punishment since 1973.  The court found that the mandatory death penalty fettered the judge's discretion to consider the convicts' personal circumstances and the facts of their crimes.

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