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.


Citation Guide