The mandatory death penalty for murder in Jamaica was abolished yesterday, winning a reprieve for more than 60 prisoners on death row, in a historic judgment from nine judges sitting in London.
But the penalty will remain in force in Trinidad and Barbados after the same judges, by a majority of five to four, ruled that the clear wording of those countries' constitutions barred them from interfering to strike it down.
The appeals to the Privy Council on behalf of four death row inmates were considered so important that the court - the final court of appeal for the Caribbean and some other former British colonies, but made up mainly of UK law lords - sat as a panel of nine judges for the first time. It normally sits in panels of five.
Most countries in the Caribbean have popular majorities which support the mandatory death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime. The possibility of its abolition by a bench composed overwhelmingly of white judges thousands of miles away is a highly sensitive issue.
The nine-judge panel was headed by Lord Bingham, senior law lord. He was joined by seven other law lords - Lords Steyn, Rodger, Hope, Hoffmann, Nicholls, Walker and Scott - and a senior judge from Jamaica, Edward Zacca.
The appeal was on behalf of four death row prisoners, Charles Matthews, from Trinidad, Lennox Boyce and Jeffrey Joseph from Barbados, and Jamaican Lambert Watson. Three leading English QCs, Nicholas Blake, Edward Fitzgerald and Keir Starmer, argued their cases free of charge.
The four men argued that there were mitigating factors in their cases which could not be taken into account by judges, who had no choice but to impose the death penalty once they were convicted of murder.
Matthews was sentenced to death in 1999 for killing his former lover out of jealousy. The same year, Watson received the death sentence for stabbing to death his nine-month-old daughter and her mother. Boyce and Joseph were jointly convicted in 2002 of the murder of Marquelle Hippolyte, 22.
The men's lawyers argued that the automatic death penalty, which precludes the possibility of individual mitigation, amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment, and breaches the Caribbean countries' constitutions and their international obligations.
The majority of five judges, led by Lord Hoffmann, held that they were constrained by the wording of the constitutions of Trinidad and Barbados, which differ from the Jamaican constitution. The minority of four, led by Lord Bingham, would have abolished the automatic death penalty.
The judgment overturns a Privy Council ruling in November 2003 that the automatic death penalty is unconstitutional in Trinidad.
But the judges yesterday reprieved more than 100 prisoners now on death row in Trinidad, ruling it would be unfair to deprive them of the benefit of the earlier ruling.
In countries where the mandatory death penalty has been struck down, courts are still free to impose it but only for the most serious cases.
It has already gone in the eastern Caribbean, following a ruling in 2001 by the Eastern Caribbean court of appeal, that the automatic imposition of the death penalty without any judicial discretion amounts to cruel and inhuman punishment.
In 2002, the Privy Council upheld that judgment in three cases from St Lucia, Belize and St Kitts, and sent the prisoners concerned back to courts in their own countries for resentencing.