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The Times October 17, 2006
A shadow of death hangs over Jamaica and its criminals
By Kirsty Brimelow
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 two 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 six 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 three 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 two 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 one hour.
We l
A shadow of death hangs over Jamaica and its criminals
By Kirsty Brimelow
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 two 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 six 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 three 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 two 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 one hour.
We l
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