KINGSTON (IPS) – In the end, not even an appeal from the internationally respected South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu made a difference.By a comfortable margin of 34 to15 with 10 abstentions, Jamaican lawmakers voted Tuesday to retain the death penalty. The conscience vote was the second in Jamaica’s modern history regarding the abolition of the death penalty. The first time, in 1979, 24 of the 44 members supported the motion.
Figures provided by the Correctional Services Department indicate that 142 Jamaicans have been executed in the 26 years between Independence in 1962 and 1988 when the last state execution took place. There are now 40 convicted killers on death row.
Tutu had joined a number of local, regional and international organisations in urging a vote against the death penalty.
In a statement issued through the human rights organisation Amnesty International, which strongly opposes capital punishment, Tutu said while Jamaica’s high murder rate had made such a decision difficult, studies have shown that in some countries the death penalty has been used as a tool of repression against the poor and racial or ethnic minorities.
“It is imposed and inflicted arbitrarily. It is an irrevocable punishment, resulting inevitably in the execution of people innocent of any crime. It is a violation of fundamental human rights,” he said adding that “Even the most callous of murderers amongst us retain their human rights.”
Last week, 14 Caribbean Anglican Bishops passed a resolution opposing the death penalty and urged the church, state and civil society to deal with the root causes of crime and violence.
“The death penalty has not been proved to be a deterrent,” the Bishops of the Church in the Province of the West Indies said in a statement following their meeting in the Bahamas.
They said they were calling “our people to stand with us in our opposition to the death penalty”.
But with the murder toll exceeding 1,300 so far this year, even the religious community has been divided on the issue.
Rev. Terrence Brown, the former head of the Spanish Town Ministers Fraternal, has said he would willingly take on the job of putting the noose around the necks of criminals, while another outspoken clergyman, Rev. Al Miller, insists that capital punishment is a deterrent to murder.
“Anyone who says it is not a deterrent is dumb,” declared the senior pastor of the Fellowship Tabernacle Church in Kingston.
But the Public Theology Forum, an ecumenical group of local ministers from different denominations, said while the public is deeply frustrated because “our leaders cannot find the way to fix the social, moral and economic crises” facing the nation, state executions were not the way forward.
“A just punishment by the state is that which helps the criminal to take full moral responsibility for his/her life-denying behaviour. Since punishment by death terminally removes the opportunity for any moral reform of the individual, then the death penalty cannot be considered a just punishment,” the group said in a statement.
The debate in Jamaica has not been lost on the international community. In a statement published in the local media, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European Union commissioner for External Relations and European Neighbourhood Policy, said Europe “encourages public debate, strengthening public opposition and putting pressure on retentionist countries to abolish the death penalty, or at least introduce a moratorium as a first step”.
Immediately after the vote was taken in Parliament, a dejected Dr. Carolyn Gomes, executive director of the human rights group Jamaicans for Justice, told reporters “this vote is really disappointing”.
“The vote was not unexpected, what was disappointing was the width of the margin,” she said, also referring to the conduct of the parliamentarians during the debate.
“This is a matter of life and death, this is not a matter that invites bad behaviour and shouting and that was the behaviour of some of our parliamentarians. It was appalling. We are talking about people’s lives,” she said.
However, she believes that the vote is not likely to result in the resumption of hangings until the London-based Privy Council, the country’s highest court, issues its own ruling.
“What we have is 1,500 murders per year and a clear-up rate of less than 40 percent. What we need to do is catch the criminals and put in the social systems and support to prevent people from falling into lives of crime,” Gomes added.
Prime Minister Bruce Golding, who voted in support of retaining the death penalty, said that providing the Senate votes in a similar manner to the House of Representatives, he would also seek to eliminate the constitutional requirement that a death penalty appeal be concluded within five years of sentencing, or a condemned inmate’s sentence must be commuted. His position is supported by the opposition People’s National Party (PNP).
In 1993, the Privy Council ruled that convicts who had been on death row for more than five years should have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
Golding said the death penalty “is an appropriate penalty for someone who takes someone else’s life in those cases that we define as capital murder” and he was confident that the judicial system could withstand international scrutiny.
Golding, who had called on all legislators to vote with their conscience and not along party lines, said that as long as the Privy Council “is an avenue of appeal open to the persons, then I am satisfied that once somebody is convicted, then the death penalty should be carried out”.
A notable absentee from Tuesday’s vote was the Leader of the Opposition Portia Simpson Miller, who had earlier indicated that an overseas assignment would prevent her from casting her ballot.
But in her contribution to the debate last week, she had indicated that “if the vote is to retain the death penalty, I would like to suggest that we discard hanging as the method of carrying out the penalty”.
Simpson Miller’s party has also proposed that the Governor General’s Privy Council in Jamaica have the final say in granting pardons or reducing sentences, or referring cases back to court for further review.
Meanwhile, the Jamaica Observer newspaper offered its own novel proposition.
In an editorial Wednesday, the paper said that “among all the things the administration will need to consider, we suggest that it should seriously look at the possibility of sentencing people convicted of capital murder to life without the possibility of parole and putting them to work on the country’s infrastructure”.
