, Washington, D.C., Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2012. , Kingston, Department of Statistics, 1953-1989. Murder is now mostly tried as a non-capital crime and in 2016 there was only one prisoner under sentence of death. While Williams’s life was spared, however, the Jamaica Privy Council also in May 1979 issued warrants for the execution of eight other prisoners. Dissatisfied with this outcome, the Cabinet returned the issue to committee in early-1978 but with the same result, except that the committee noted specifically on this occasion that it lacked the resources to conduct a full investigation into the “effect of capital punishment as a deterrent to crime”.81 In the wake of this report, Rattray called for a formal suspension of the death penalty pending a more detailed study of its effects.82 This proposal was rejected in the House of Representatives on 30 January 1979 by a narrow vote of twenty-three to twenty, but a week later the Senate voted in favour of an eighteen-month suspension of executions.83 Commentary in Jamaica’s leading daily newspaper, the Gleaner, expressed exasperation at the state of affairs, which it believed left the Governor-General and Jamaica Privy Council “in a most unenviable position”, imposed psychological cruelty on condemned prisoners by delaying executions and raising hopes of a reprieve, and insulted public opinion, which, it argued, supported the continuation of hanging. The first concerned prisoners’ correspondence with their attorneys and other supporters on the outside. When Mario Hector and Winston Williams were convicted in February 1972, condemned prisoners were held in A block, but four months later death row was moved to an expanded and more secure location on the upper floor of the prison’s Gibraltar Block where twenty-six single-person cells were arranged on either side of a corridor. This gives further reason to believe that the views Hector expressed were largely his own. Banner, S., The Death Penalty: an American History, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2003. 70 Williams was convicted of aggravated robbery in the Home Circuit Court in Kingston on 3 October 1969 and sentenced to five years imprisonment and four lashes. The Jamaican government’s Fourth Periodic Report concedes that the death penalty may be applied only if domestic law ensures “the relevant safeguards such as the observance of due process.” 16 Yet the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has criticized Hector also wrote under difficult conditions. 53 “Man hanged”, Gleaner, 20 October 1971, p.2. Another warder was taken hostage at the recently established Gun Prison and the convicts involved won an audience with the national security minister. Barrett, I. R., “The Ombudsman in Jamaica”, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. The justices nonetheless gave a strong steer in support of clemency for the appellants, drawing attention to the potential for the prerogative of mercy to serve as a mechanism for mitigating unequal punishments in appropriate cases. Death by hanging was the mandatory penalty for murder and the number of death sentences handed down by Jamaican courts each year grew from roughly fourteen in the late 1960s to an average of nearly fifty in the 1970s. Until steps were taken to muffle the noise in the wake of prisoner complaints, the lever which activated the gallows “made a disturbing sound that reverberated throughout the institution”. 126-140. and dismissing Baker and Tyrell’s appeal in a split 3-2 decision announced in May 1975. , delivered by Lord Diplock, the justices declared themselves unwilling to deviate from the literal meaning of Jamaica’s juvenile capital punishment law even while recognising that it could result in “a degree of inequality of punishment between two persons of the same age who committed similar crimes on the same day”, but were tried and sentenced at different times. 19 December 2018 English-speaking Caribbean: time to make the death penalty history When Mario Hector and Winston Williams were convicted in February 1972, condemned prisoners were held in A block, but four months later death row was moved to an expanded and more secure location on the upper floor of the prison’s Gibraltar Block where twenty-six single-person cells were arranged on either side of a corridor.14 A further three cells were situated adjacent to the death chamber that housed the gallows and used to hold inmates in the days immediately preceding their scheduled execution. 14Amidst the indignities and violence of life on the row, there were moments of humanity among the prisoners. 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