TRINIDAD: PRIVY COUNCIL REFUSES TO COMMUTE DEATH SENTENCE...FIRST TIME IN 22 YEARS

For the first time in 22 years, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), by a majority ruling, refused to commute the death sentences imposed on two Trinidadian men who were convicted by a jury and sentenced to hang in 2008 by a High Court judge in Port of Spain.
Lord Toulsen, who wrote the 30-page judgment, said the basis for their dismissal of the appeal against the sentences was that the convicts, Timothy Hunte and Shazad Khan, upon their appeal at the local Court of Appeal which was also dismissed, did not raise the argument of the constitutionality of their sentence and, as such, it could not be raised as a fresh issue at the JCPC.
But even though the Board ruled otherwise in previous appeals where the issue was not raised at the local Court of Appeal, Lord Toulsen said these rulings were wrong and that the Board must now depart from those wrongful judgments.
It was a well-known principle established by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in the famous case of Pratt and Morgan in 1993, that people convicted of murder and sentenced to death cannot be legally executed if they spend more than five years on death row awaiting execution.
From then to now, the JCPC has commuted the death sentence imposed on possibly hundreds of individuals to life in prison based on this principle.