The mandatory death penalty for murder in Jamaica was...

The mandatory death penalty for murder in Jamaica was abolished, winning a reprieve for more than 60 prisoners on death row, in a historic judgment from nine judges sitting in London.
But the penalty will remain in force in Trinidad and Barbados after the same judges, by a majority of five to four, ruled that the clear wording of those countries' constitutions barred them from interfering to strike it down.
The appeals to the Privy Council on behalf of four death row inmates were considered so important that the court - the final court of appeal for the Caribbean and some other former British colonies, but made up mainly of UK law lords - sat as a panel of nine judges for the first time. It normally sat in panels of five.
Most countries in the Caribbean had popular majorities which supported the mandatory death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime. The possibility of its abolition by a bench composed overwhelmingly of white judges thousands of miles away was a highly sensitive issue.
The nine-judge panel was headed by Lord Bingham, senior law lord. He was joined by seven other law lords - Lords Steyn, Rodger, Hope, Hoffmann, Nicholls, Walker and Scott - and a senior judge from Jamaica, Edward Zacca. The appeal was on behalf of four death row prisoners, Charles Matthews, from Trinidad, Lennox Boyce and Jeffrey Joseph from Barbados, and Jamaican Lambert Watson.
Three leading English QCs, Nicholas Blake, Edward Fitzgerald and Keir Starmer, argued their cases free of charge. 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 in 2002 of the murder of Marquelle Hippolyte, 22.
The men's lawyers argued 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 majority of five judges, led by Lord Hoffmann, held that they were constrained by the wording of the constitutions of Trinidad and Barbados, which differed from the Jamaican constitution. The minority of four, led by Lord Bingham, would have abolished the automatic death penalty.
The judgment overturned a Privy Council ruling in November 2003 that the automatic death penalty was unconstitutional in Trinidad. But the judges reprieved more than 100 prisoners now on death row in Trinidad, ruling it would be unfair to deprive them of the benefit of the earlier ruling.