The most famous of these cases is Pratt and Morgan, which stated that the sentence of death should be imposed within five years from the date of sentence or else the sentence would become invalid because to hold someone on death row for one day more than five years would be considered cruel and unusual punishment. But while the legislation seeks to overcome existing hindrances to the implementation of capital punishment, it appears to assume that the Privy Council is incapable of coming up with new ways to prevent sovereign countries from creating and carrying out laws, according to the cultural mores of the countries.
Given the clear indication that a majority of the members of the Privy Council have an ideological predisposition against capital punishment, it is obvious that that institution would waste no time in finding "creative" ways of blocking the legislation-if indeed the Government is successful in passing it. The logic of the legislation that the Prime Minister tabled in Parliament yesterday, therefore, is that for it to be successful in its ability to carry out the death penalty in a way that is beyond challenge, the administration would need to go the additional step and terminate this country's relationship with the Privy Council.
It would be naive in the extreme for the Government to expect that the Privy Council would allow the mere entrenchment of capital punishment in T&T's Constitution to prevent it from throwing up ever more creative obstacles. The real proof of the Government's seriousness on this issue-which the Prime Minister went out of her way to say was a reaction to the onslaught of crime this country has suffered recently-would be if it ended the relationship with the Privy Council. It needs to be recalled that the Caribbean Court of Justice is located in Port-of-Spain, funded to a large extent by monies from T&T taxpayers, is headed by a pre-eminent Trinidadian jurist, and is staffed by the finest legal minds in the region.