(continues from above)The appeal was the culmination...

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The appeal was the culmination of a strategy deployed over the last six years by English lawyers working free of charge on behalf of Caribbean death row inmates.
The campaign had been spearheaded by the London law firm Simons Muirhead and Burton, which represented three of the four men appeal including, Charles Matthews, from Trinidad, and Lennox Boyce and Jeffrey Joseph, from Barbados.
The fourth man, Lambert Watson, from Jamaica, was represented by the City law firm Allen & Overy.
Three leading English QCs, Nicholas Blake, Edward Fitzgerald and Keir Starmer were appearing without charge on behalf of the four death row inmates.
If successful, up to 300 prisoners on death row in the three countries would have their sentences reviewed. The death penalty would not be abolished but would be limited to the most serious cases, and would no longer be the automatic penalty for murder.
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 and sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of 22-year-old Marquelle Hippolyte.
They were granted a stay of execution less than a week before they were due to hang, when their cases were referred to the privy council.
The men's lawyers were to argue that the automatic death penalty, which precluded the possibility of individual mitigation, amounted to inhuman and degrading treatment, and breached the Caribbean countries' constitutions and their international obligations.
The mandatory death penalty had already gone in the eastern Caribbean, following a ruling in 2001 by the Eastern Caribbean court of appeal, sitting in St Vincent, that the automatic imposition of the death penalty without any judicial discretion amounted to cruel and inhuman punishment.
This was the first time that a domestic Caribbean court declared the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional.
In 2002, the privy council upheld that judgment in three cases from St Lucia, Belize and St Kitts and sent the prisoners back to courts in their own countries for resentencing.