The resumption of hanging in March 1996, after a moratorium...

The resumption of hanging in March 1996, after a moratorium of almost 12 years, appears to have done little to curb murders in the Bahamas. In 1999 a record 65 people were murdered. In December 1999 the Privy Council dismissed appeals against death sentences by David Mitchell and John Higgs. The appeals were dismissed despite the opinion of Privy Council judges Lords Steyn and Cooke, who found that the conditions the convicts had been kept in had deprived the Bahamian Government of the right to execute them. Both Higgs and Mitchell had been held in prison in the Bahamas for years in a death row regime described by Lord Steyn as "an affront to the most elementary standards of decency." For several years, in breach of Bahamian prison rules, the men were confined to a small single cell in appalling conditions. Unfortunately for Higgs and Mitchell, the majority of three Privy Council judges - Lords Hoffmann, Hobhouse and Kelly - ruled that there was no necessary connection between the unlawful conditions and the right of the State to take their lives. They also said they did not consider that the conditions were contrary to the Constitution. The case raises the issue of whether the death penalty can ever be enforced decently and turns the spotlight on the obligation on states with the death penalty to ensure that condemned men are treated humanely.