Sat Ma­haraj

At the time of writ­ing, the mur­der rate for 2013 stood at 403 with three more days to go in the cur­rent year.Some peo­ple, in­clud­ing law en­force­ment of­fi­cials, might claim suc­cess in the num­ber of homi­cides since this year's fig­ure is less than the num­ber in 2008 when mur­ders climbed to 550.Many so­cial and re­li­gious ac­tivists in­sist that T&T re­in­sti­tute hang­ing for cap­i­tal of­fences. But some in our midst think of them as blood-thirsty cit­i­zens.

Ac­cord­ing to the law of T&T, "Every per­son con­vict­ed of mur­der shall suf­fer death ac­cord­ing to Sec­tion 4 of the Of­fences Against the Per­son Act."The Crim­i­nal Pro­ce­dure Act, Chap­ter 12:02 at Sec­tion 57 pro­vides:

"Every war­rant for the ex­e­cu­tion of any pris­on­er un­der sen­tence of death shall be un­der the hand and seal of the Pres­i­dent, and shall be di­rect­ed to the Mar­shal, and shall be car­ried in­to ex­e­cu­tion by such Mar­shal or his as­sis­tant at such time and place as men­tioned in the war­rant; and the war­rant shall be in the form set out as Form A in the Sec­ond Sched­ule..."The law in T&T is that death by hang­ing for cap­i­tal of­fences can take place.

But be­cause of cer­tain re­stric­tions by the Privy Coun­cil, our high­est court, based in Lon­don, it has be­come al­most im­pos­si­ble to in­voke this law that is be­ing sup­port­ed by ap­prox­i­mate­ly 90 per cent of our pop­u­la­tion.The Privy Coun­cil it­self has banned the death penal­ty at home and has lob­bied its for­mer colonies, like T&T, to fol­low suit.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers