Over the next two days, the Privy Council will be busy with an appeal by a convicted murderer who is seeking to have the mandatory death penalty for murder deemed unconstitutional.
If successful, the case brought by Jay Chandler, which will be considered by a special panel of nine Law Lords, will not only affect the death penalty, but could also see the possibility of colonial laws that are incompatible with constitutional and modern human rights being struck down.
In the appeal, the Privy Council is being asked to consider the continued applicability of Section 6 of the Constitution, which “saves” or insulates laws passed prior to Independence, such as the death penalty and public health ordinances being used in the COVID-19 pandemic, from review.
The outcome of the case will directly impact several recent cases, including LGBT+ activist Jason Jones’ lawsuit over discriminatory buggery laws and former Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha secretary general Satnarayan Maharaj’s lawsuit over sedition, which were both upheld by the High Court.
While Maharaj is now deceased, his son is appealing the Court of Appeal’s dismissal of the case to the Privy Council, while Jones’ case is still before the Court of Appeal with no date for hearing set.
In the case, the Privy Council will have to consider whether to reverse its previous decision from 2005, when it upheld the death penalty based on the savings clause.
It will also consider a 2018 ruling in a case from Barbados, in which the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), as that country’s final appellate court, said the death penalty violated rights under its constitution, which has a similar savings clause.
While death penalty remains a law in T&T, the sentence has not been carried out since late July 1999, when Anthony Briggs was executed for bludgeoning a taxi driver to death during in a botched robbery seven years earlier. In 2011, Chandler was convicted of murdering Kern Phillip, a fellow remand prisoner at the Golden Grove Prison, Arouca, in 2004.
Chandler, 43, was accused of stabbing Phillip with a makeshift knife during airing time at the prison.Chandler lost his appeal in the Court of Appeal and in 2018, the Privy Council dismissed his final appeal, which sought to have fresh medical evidence of his mental state at the time admitted.
The ruling in the case was a majority decision with two of the five judges on the panel dissenting, as they felt that case should be remitted to the local court to decide whether he should have benefited from the defence of diminished responsibility.
Like most convicted of murder over the past two decades, Chandler benefited from the Privy Council’s 1993 ruling in the Jamaican case of Pratt and Morgan, in which it ruled that the death penalty cannot be carried out if convicted persons are not executed within five years of being sentenced.
The potential impact of Chandler’s case was discussed yesterday during a panel discussion in the UK Parliament hosted by Jones and the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group for Global LGBT+ Rights on the role of the Privy Council as the Supreme Court of the Caribbean.
