A new study on the use of the death penalty in Trinidad and Tobago has been published by Roger Hood and Florence Seemungal. The authors closely examine prosecutions under the country’s mandatory death penalty statute, which requires imposition of a death sentence whenever a defendant is found guilty of murder. The study found that, despite a high number of killings, relatively few people were convicted of murder, and not necessarily those who committed the most heinous crimes.

The authors note that witness intimidation may be a factor in the scarcity of convictions and that this reluctance to testify is heightened by the prospect of an automatic death sentence upon conviction. “In England and Wales and Canada,” the study notes, “murder convictions were much easier to obtain after capital punishment was abolished.”

Other conclusions of the study include:

The fact that only five per cent of murders recorded by the police between 1998 and 2002 had by the end of 2002 resulted in a conviction for murder … indicates how unlikely that penalty is to be as an effective deterrent to all types of murder.

It is ironic that the very type of murder which is perhaps least likely to be the result of carefully planned crime [namely domestic murders] is the type of killing most likely to end up with a conviction for murder.

[B]ecause the system as it operates produces a pattern of murder convictions biased toward certain types of unlawful killing, those who are of East-Indian descent who kill East-Indian victims are far more likely to be sentenced to death than persons of African descent who kill African victims.

(“A Rare and Arbitrary Fate: Conviction for Murder, the Mandatory Death Penalty and the Reality of Homicide in Trinidad and Tobago,” Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford 2006; A Report to the Death Penalty Project). See Arbitrariness and International.