It was reported that hundreds of death row prisoners...

It was reported that hundreds of death row prisoners in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica could win a reprieve if an unprecedented privy council hearing beginning in London ruled that the mandatory death penalty for murder was unconstitutional.
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 panel composed overwhelmingly of white judges thousands of miles away is a highly sensitive issue politically.
Some observers argued that it should be for the countries' parliaments, and not distant judges, to decide whether the mandatory death sentence should be abolished.
The case was seen as so important that the privy council - the final court of appeal for the Caribbean and some other former British colonies, but made up mainly of UK law lords - which normally sits in panels of five, decided to field nine judges for the first time.
The role of the privy council as the final court of appeal for some former British colonies dates back to 1625. Caribbean countries had resolved to replace it with their own Caribbean court of justice, but its gestation had been prolonged by political disagreements.
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. (to be continued)