Hands Off Cain

Murder is the only death-qualifiable offence.

Murder is the only death-qualifiable offence.

2 MIN READ
Murder is the only death-qualifiable offence. The Governor-General has the power to grant clemency.
Saint Kitts is a British Independent Territory for which the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) is the final court of appeal.
Since the 1993 Pratt and Morgan ruling by the Privy Council, the death penalty can not be carried out if the prisoner concerned has been under sentence of death for more than five years, in which case the sentence is automatically commuted to life imprisonment.
On March 11, 2002, the JCPC confirmed the April 2001 decision of the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal (ECCA) ruling that the mandatory death penalty was unconstitutional, and unanimously struck down the mandatory death penalty for murder in St Kitts and Nevis and six other countries. The JCPC made one modification to the ECCA's ruling, saying that sentences should be set by a judge and not a jury. All death row cases in these countries had to be reviewed.
On July 20, 1998, the first hanging in Saint Kitts and Nevis took place since 1981. David Wilson, 28, an inmate convicted of beating a security guard to death in 1994, was executed. A panel of Appeal Judges had denied Wilson's appeal, and Governor-General Cuthbert Sebastian signed the required execution notice. The execution took place before Wilson was able to appeal to the JCPC.
In 2001, St Kitts was one of eleven states to ratify an agreement to establish the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to replace the Privy Council as the final court of appeal in the region.
St Kitts was also one of only six countries that had decided to replace the Privy Council by the CCJ by late 2004.
The region’s leaders say the court will remove the last vestiges of colonialism. Human rights groups however have expressed concerns that the CCJ will be used to speed up hangings, with Caribbean governments favouring the death penalty.
The Caribbean Court of Justice was inaugurated in Trinidad on April 16, 2005.