Should hangings be resumed?

Jun 11, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The escape of Royden Williams from Guyana’s high-security (no pun intended) Mazaruni Prison and now the murder of an officer of the Guyana Defence Force by armed bandits have resurrected calls for hangings to be resumed.

One argument being made is that we have persons on death row who are being held at the pleasure of the State and the expense of taxpayers, and this is likely to continue for the remainder of their natural lifetime. As such, it is being suggested that those on death row be executed forthwith.

It is not as simple an issue as that. For one, many of those on death row have not exhausted their legal appeals. They cannot and should not be executed unless these appeals have been exhausted. They are others, however, who have exhausted their appeals and are languishing on death row. This brings us to the next issue.

There is judicial precedent both at the Caribbean Court of Justice and the Privy Council to the effect that having someone on death row for more than 6 and one-half years constitutes inhuman and degrading punishment. In Pratt and Morgan v. Attorney General of Jamaica, the Privy Council ruled that keeping someone on death row for 14 years was inhuman and degrading treatment and this is prohibited by the Constitution of Jamaica.

Guyana’s constitution has a similar provision to that of Jamaica. As such, it can be inferred that it would be unconstitutional to hold someone more than five years on death row.

Any attempt to carry out the death sentence for those languishing on death row for more than five years is likely to be met by a legal challenge, and the courts have been predisposed towards commuting these death sentences to life imprisonment. This is how one judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice put it during a lecture he delivered in 2012:

“A period of five years following sentence was established as a reasonable, though not by any means inflexible, time-limit within which the entire post-sentence legal process should be completed and the execution carried out. If the execution was not carried out within that time frame, there was a strong likelihood that the court would regard the delay as amounting to inhuman treatment and commute the death sentence to one of life imprisonment.”

Given the backlog in our appeals’ process, a death row convict would be very fortunate to have his appeal heard and completed within five years of conviction. And if perchance he or she can do this and the sentence is upheld, there is still a resort under international conventions such as the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. A prisoner may also seek recourse under the Optional Protocol of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.

The PPP/C government, having acceded to the Optional Protocol in 1993, was forced to pass a resolution in the National Assembly in 1998 renouncing the Protocol and re-acceding to the Protocol with a reservation that it reserves the right to carry out capital punishment for anyone convicted to death.

The government then said that it considered that death row prisoners were abusing the procedures under the Optional Protocol after their sentences would have been upheld by the Court of Appeal. Despite this reservation, there have been no hangings since 1997 when two men were executed.

The previous year two persons were also executed. More importantly, four death row prisoners were released in 2012 in accordance with the Pratt decision, considering the long time they would have spent on death row.

Both the PPP/C and the APNU+AFC governments have not attempted to remove the death penalty from the law books. Yet, neither has shown any inclination to carry out the death sentences. David Granger was even quoted as saying, “I have no intention of executing anyone.”

The PPP/C however in 2010 removed the mandatory nature of the death penalty for murder. It is now at the discretion of the court to decide whether a person should be sentenced to death or receive an alternative sentence.

It should be recalled that one of the obstacles to the extradition of Sergeant Gregory Smith, who was implicated in the murder of Walter Rodney, was that Guyana had the death penalty on the books and French law prohibited extradition someone to a country where the death penalty remained lawful.

In the meantime, international pressure is mounting on Guyana to abolish the death penalty. There have been calls by foreign governments for this to happen.

But every time there is a crime wave, there is equally a demand for hangings. But even if Irfaan Ali wishes to go in this direction, it is now a virtual legal impossibility to hang anyone, given the death penalty jurisprudence which has evolved since 1993.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Guyana Defence Force, hangings, Mazaruni Prison, Peeping Tom, Royden Williams

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