Six convicted murderers in Jamaica were spared from...

Six convicted murderers in Jamaica were spared from hanging by a Privy Council ruling that all prisoners should be given access to the Jamaican Mercy Committee, the body which decides who will be executed and who should receive mercy. The Council also held that it was unlawful to execute prisoners without regard to decisions of international human rights bodies such as the UN Human Rights Committee and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The court ruled to commute the death sentences to life imprisonment. The six killers - Neville Lewis, Patrick Taylor, Anthony McLeod, Christopher Brown, Desmond Taylor and Steve Shaw - had exhausted appeals of their murder convictions. In a last desperate attempt to avoid execution, they appealed to the U.K. Privy Council, arguing their lawyers should have been allowed to present arguments to the local Privy Council when that body met to consider granting them mercy. The British body had previously held there was no such obligation.But Jamaica's minister of national security, K.D Knight, said the judges "found it necessary to distinguish this case from the previous cases and ... that procedural fairness requires that the convicts be allowed to make representation to the (local) Privy Council." The ruling dashed government hopes of immediately resuming the execution of prisoners. The decision by the Privy Council, the final court of appeals for such commonwealth nations as Jamaica, Trinidad, the Bahamas and Barbados, resulted in a stay of execution for hundreds of death-row prisoners in the Caribbean.