The New Hanging Bill
October 30, 2000
By Kim Johnson
IN its most recent avatar the Constitution (Amendment) (No. 3) Bill 2000, which has been laid in Parliament, shows that Attorney General Ramesh Maharaj has both the tenacity and the belligerence of a pitbull.
And if there's anyone who brings those traits out in him (more than the Chief Justice) it is people who frustrate his urge to hang condemned men and women.
Four years ago, he raised the idea of amending the Constitution to make execution nice and easy, by abolishing criminal appeals to the Privy Council. The main target was the Pratt and Morgan judgment, which made it illegal to hang someone more than five years after being sentenced.
The few dozen people who attended Maharaj’s "national consultation" on the issue supported his proposals. Some went further, calling for the execution of rapists and kidnappers as well; others wanted more strokes for criminals. Teachers and parents were recommended to join the act by flogging children more often and more severely.
The draft bill was sloppily written, however, even in its grammar. It took some time to reach Parliament.
In the interim, Maharaj lambasted the Privy Council, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee. And in 1996, amidst a wave of intense political mobilisation, he produced an upgraded "Hanging Bill" in Parliament.
It sought to erase judicial decisions which stipulated that four days must elapse between reading the warrant and hanging the man (or woman, as Maharaj emphasised).
You could be hanged minutes after your warrant was read. That way, there's no time to contact a lawyer. Or, alternatively, the warrant could be read and a living body could be kept fresh and available to be hanged whenever the need arose: five days or five years later.
That Hanging Bill made it legal to execute men and women anywhere—in Woodford Square, perhaps, if it were considered expedient. No stay would be granted on the basis of "the conditions of confinement". They could be suspended in cages outside the jail, like slavery times.
No challenge was possible on "the manner of carrying out of the sentence". Condemned men and women could be burnt at the stake. Indeed, they could be cremated alive in the St James Crematorium—or on the banks of the Caroni—to avoid burial expenses.
No stays were to be granted on the basis of the time between charge and conviction. Bring back the good old days when a man could spend 15 years in jail before his trial.
No stays were to be granted on the basis of any international treaty, whatever smiles and handshakes and signatures were exchanged with leaders of other countries, whatever promises were made to give prisoners rights to appeal to international bodies.
The bill did not receive the required two-thirds majority, and Prime Minister Basdeo Panday vowed to shift to Plan B.
Now it has resurfaced in an even more draconian form, taking into account more recent judgments and further reducing the grounds on which stays of execution may not be granted.
The Hanging Bill No. 3 has kept all the prohibitions of No. 2, and added to them a few new ones.
Once the death warrant has been signed by the President, "the High Court shall have no jurisdiction". Thus, what ought to have happened but didn't in Russell Sankeralli's case—the High Court should have decided on the admissibility of his new evidence—will now be made illegal.
In case there's another Glen Ashby-type situation, no stay shall be granted because his case is currently before the court.
Following the recent Privy Council judgment which gives condemned men a right of representation before the Mercy Committee, the new Hanging Bill provides that nothing about the Committee's deliberations can be subject to judicial review.
The list of seven grounds which cannot win the condemned man a stay of execution, commutation remission or alteration are not exhaustive. Indeed, a condemned man cannot get a stay "on any ground". At all.
Precisely because of its extreme provisions, it is unlikely that this new Hanging Bill will become law. Even if it does get the required two-thirds majority in Parliament, Section 13.1 of the Constitution allows the court to declare null and void any act shown "not to be reasonably justifiable in a society that has a proper respect for the rights and freedoms of the individual".
And no court will ever endorse an act which purports to give the Government permission to wallow in barbarism.
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