The Barbados parliament passed a constitutional amendment...

The Barbados parliament passed a constitutional amendment removing restrictions to the death penalty, with Attorney General Mia Mottley warning that the changes will not result in any immediate resumption of hangings on the island. In her contribution to the debate in the Lower House, Mottley said the amendments were not retroactive and would not apply to anybody who received the death sentence before the amendments become operational.
She said government was aware of a conscious effort to remove the death penalty from the statute books of Caribbean countries but there continued to be regional support for that method of punishment after due process.
Parliamentarians on both the government and opposition benches took part in Tuesday's debate, which ended in approval of the Constitution Amendment Act 2002.
The new legislation not only addresses the mitigating effects of the 1993 Pratt and Morgan ruling by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, which limits to five years the time a prisoner can be kept on death row but is designed to forestall a 12 March 2002 decision outlawing mandatory death sentences in seven Eastern Caribbean countries from being applied to Barbados.
While supporting the amendment, opposition leader David Thompson expressed concern about undue delay in the judicial system, saying that a delay in the execution of the death sentence constituted cruel and inhuman treatment.
He said the law should be carried out in cases where people have exhausted their appeals.
"We must find a way to be more productive and efficient in getting these matters through the court system, having all the appeals exhausted and all of the processes put in place, so that the law in Barbados can be carried out.
"But we should not be finding ourselves in a position in the year 2002 where we are introducing an amendment which declares to the world that we accept as part of the constitution of Barbados and as part of our bill of rights that a delay in carrying out the death penalty is acceptable. It is not, it is cruel and it is in human in my view," Thompson said.
Government MP Henry Forde said while he agreed with the opposition leader that the debate was not directly a debate about the death penalty, although the death penalty and its application were sub-stratas of the legislation.
Forde said few, if any politicians on the island, were prepared to lead public opinion away from the death penalty.
He said most Barbadians were in favour of the hangings and against abolition of the death penalty and the public at the moment was not prepared to be led away from that position.