[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Oct. 17



JAMAICA:

A shadow of death hangs over Jamaica and its criminals----Our
correspondent reports on her working trip to Kingston to help men facing
execution


"THE ultimate measure of whether a society can properly be called
civilised is how it treats those who are near the bottom of its human
heap"  the late Paul Sieghart

POLITICAL anxiety is increasing in the Caribbean over plans to abolish the
right of a final appeal to the Privy Council. The proposed Caribbean Court
of Justice is viewed by many Jamaican attorneys as a vehicle for resuming
executions. As pressures intensify, the Privy Council is moving for the
first time to the Caribbean to hear a case.

Recently I went to Kingston for 2 months for the Bar Human Rights
Committee to work with attorneys in preparing the defence of clients
facing the death penalty.

Nobody has been executed in Jamaica since March 1988 when Stanford Dinnal
and Nathan Foster were hanged. Instead, the condemned languish on death
row. I was in Jamaica in a time of huge legislative change. The mandatory
death penalty had been ruled unconstitutional by the Privy Council.
Prisoners who had received the mandatory penalty were being resentenced.
The Privy Council had also ruled it unconstitutional to dispatch those who
had spent more than five years awaiting execution.

I was involved in the resentencing process. Lambert Watson was resentenced
to 20 years' imprisonment. Kevin Mayne, a confused young man with a
medical history indicating brain damage, was resentenced to 25 years.
David Gordon was resentenced to death. His appeal is pending. By the time
I left, there were 6 men still on death row (one had hanged himself). But
there were more prisoners on the block as some, such as Mayne, were too
frightened to go back into the wider prison.

Many people in Jamaica favour executions, seeing them as the solution to
spiralling violence. The figures were all over the news  1,674 people
murdered there in 2005 compared with 1,471 in 2004. The number of police
officers killed on duty increased by 60 in 2005. The flip side is that
alleged extrajudicial executions occur regularly and investigations remain
inadequate.

The shadow of gunmen stretched from downtown Kingston to Spanish Town. I
visited 3 prisons in and around Kingston. They were crammed with people
who had been there for years  disempowered through poverty and, often,
represented by attorneys not paid enough to care. Legal aid does exist but
it is very low. There is a hard core of dedicated conscientious attorneys.
Many others, though, had little grasp of the details of a case and allowed
the defendant to remain a passive spectator.

Client contact was kept to the minimum. Ultimately, the conviction rate
appeared to be very high, even on weak evidence. The defendants were
absorbed into the prisons and faded away as the attorney moved to the next
case.

Major Richard Reese, the Commissioner of Corrections, asked me to examine
a Cabinet proposal on electronic tagging. In return he agreed to my
request for a tour of death row. Few attorneys I met have been there. St
Catherine District Prison has 1,227 inmates although it was built to take
800. Death row consists of 2 blocks with 26 cells in each. Each cell is
about 10ft by 5ft  some were daubed with religious praise, some heralded
Rastafari, others prayed to God. There was an eerie feel as tangible
traces of lives were evident on some walls and whitewashed away on others.
Most cells had a mattress on the floor although some people had only a
concrete bed. Inmates showed me photographs of their families. David
Gordon showed me models and picture frames he had made from matchsticks. A
warder commented that he had a lot of time to make them. A television
stands at the end of each corridor, beaming out a silent fluorescent
picture of a world outside. There is an enclosed exercise yard and the
warders take the prisoners, five at a time, for a required 1 hour.

We left in silence as the other inmates  the privileged ones  shouted
around us. A local said that probably the prisoners lives werent much
better before they were locked up. I doubted that. Inside death row even
the air felt like a counted commodity.

(source: The (UK) Times----The author, Kirsty Brimelow, a criminal
barrister at 187 Fleet Street, is a member of the Bar Human Rights
Committee)