[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

June 21


BARBADOS:

Bajan death penalty case goes to CCJ


Barbadian Queen's Counsel Roger Forde and attorney Brian Barrow arrive at
the Caribbean Court of Justice yesterday to begin arguments in an appeal
involving 2 Barbadian killers.

A full panel of 7 judges of the Caribbean Court of Justice yesterday
convened to begin hearing arguments on whether the death penalty should be
re-imposed on 2 Barbadian killers whose sentences have already been
commuted to life imprisonment.

The case involves a challenge to a decision of the Barbados Appeal Court
which held that the Barbados Privy Council, a body which is charged with
the responsibility of dealing with applications for clemency from
condemned killers, should have waited on the reports of the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) with respect to Jeffrey Joseph and
Lennox Boyce before deciding to commute their sentences.

However, attorneys representing the Barbados Attorney General,
Superintendent of Prisons and Chief Marshal, argued that while Barbados
was a signatory of the international treaty recognising the IACHR, it was
never incorporated as part of Barbados' domestic laws and therefore its
findings have no effect for convicted killers.

Attorneys Roger Forde QC, Adrian Cummins QC and Brian Barrow are
representing Barbadian officials while Alair Shepherd QC, Douglas Mendes
SC, Maurice Adrian King, Wendy Maraj, Peta-Gay Lee-Brace and Philip McWatt
are representing Joseph and Boyce.

President of the Court Michael de la Bastide, along with Justices Rolston
Nelson, Duke Pollard, Desiree Bernard, Jacob Wit, David Hayton and Adrian
Saunders, are expected to complete hearing submissions today at the new
CCJ headquarters on Henry Street, Port of Spain.

Joseph and Boyce were convicted of murdering Marquelle Hippolyte on
February 2, 2001.

Hippolyte was killed in April 1999 after he was attacked and beaten with a
piece of wood by 4 men.

The Barbados Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals of Joseph and Boyce on
March 27, 2002 and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council came to the
same conclusion on July 7, 2004.

On September 3, 2004, both men petitioned the IACHR seeking clemency but
the Commission is yet to deliver its report on the matter.

Death warrants have been read twice to Joseph and Boyce but they managed
to block their impending executions to await the report of the IACHR.

Forde admitted at the onset of his arguments that the case before the CCJ
was "not primarily a death penalty case" since the constitutionality of
the mandatory death sentence had already been decided by London's Privy
Council.

He argued that a condemned man had no right to mercy before the Barbadian
clemency committee but only a right to a process that was fair.

He also submitted that a convicted murderer did not have a right to
enquire into the procedure adopted by the committee.

Forde submitted that if one took into consideration all the guidelines
imposed by the Privy Council, including the five-year time frame to
execute convicted killers, and also wait on international human rights
organisations to give decisions, then the death penalty would never be
implemented since by that time the five-year limit would have expired.

However, de la Bastide pointed out that one possible way of dealing with
that situation was to impose time limits, available under Barbadian laws,
or disregard the time taken by the international bodies in rendering
decisions.

He later added that the part of the dilemma of Caribbean governments was
that the "bar continues to be raised" on what they have to do in order to
carry out an execution while at the same time operate within the
constraints of the laws governing the particular country.

He said it was a matter of concern since the death penalty had been held
by to constitutionality proper by the Privy Council and questioned whether
it could ever be implemented and in that context, de la Bastide noted that
he was seeking to explore ways of resolving that dilemma.

(source: Trinidad News)






JAPAN:

Top court sends case back, saying consider death penalty anew


The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a life sentence for a 25-year-old
man convicted of the 1999 murders of a woman and her infant daughter, and
ordered the Hiroshima High Court to rehear the case with an eye to
sentencing the killer to hang.

Hiroshi Motomura, whose wife and daughter were murdered in 1999, holds a
news conference Tuesday after the Supreme Court ordered the case sent back
to be reheard.

The top court ruled that just because the killer was a juvenile when he
murdered Yayoi Motomura, 23, and her 11-month-old daughter in Hikari,
Yamaguchi Prefecture, was not necessarily sufficient cause to spare his
life.

This is the 3rd time since records started being kept in 1966 that the
Supreme Court has rejected a lower court's life sentence for a defendant
whom prosecutors wanted executed and sent the case back to the lower
court.

The Hiroshima High Court had upheld the Yamaguchi District Court's life
sentence handed down in 2000 for the man, who cannot be named as he was a
juvenile at the time of the crime.

"While the fact that the defendant was 18 at the time of the murders is a
factor that should be considered when deciding whether to hand down the
death penalty, it is not a decisive reason for not giving a death
sentence," presiding Justice Toyozo Ueda said. "On the contrary, it should
be only one factor and be measured against the criminality, motives,
means, gravity of the crime, and the feelings of the survivors."

Legal experts said the decision is an indication that the judicial balance
is tipping toward victims.

"Crime victims are speaking out, and the courts are well aware that the
public is taking a harder line against juvenile criminals," said Kenji
Hirose, a former judge who now teaches law at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

Yayoi Motomura's husband, Hiroshi, has been very public in his demand for
the death penalty and lobbied both times to get prosecutors to appeal the
life sentence, saying he saw little remorse in the man.

"I applaud the fact that the Supreme Court said being a juvenile at the
time of the crime is not a good enough reason to avoid the death penalty,"
Motomura told reporters.

However, he said he was disappointed the top court itself did not hand
down the death penalty.

"It's been seven years" since the murders, he said. "There's no telling
how many more years it's going to take" before the case is finalized.

"We most fear that the defendant may use every tactic to avoid the death
penalty, including prolonging the trial," he said, citing the case of
Shoko Asahara, the founder of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, who has been on
trial since April 1996.

Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, has been convicted and faces
the death penalty for multiple murders and for masterminding the March
1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system.

In Tuesday's ruling, the Supreme Court said the courts should keep in mind
that the defendant had not planned to murder his 2 victims.

However, that fact in itself is not enough to warrant a reprieve, the
court said, because the defendant planned to rape his victim, and "his
coldblooded murders arose from a desire to keep that crime hidden."

As for the high court's acknowledgment that the defendant suffered from a
troubled childhood, with his mother committing suicide when he was in
junior high school, the Supreme Court said, "While we agree that there
were unfortunate and unstable elements as he grew up, he received a high
school education, and we cannot say that his upbringing was especially
bad."

On April 14, 1999, the killer, then aged 18 years and 30 days, entered
Motomura's home pretending to be a plumber. He grabbed the woman from
behind and strangled her when she screamed and fought back.

He then tied her wrists and covered her nose and mouth with duct tape
before raping her, according to court rulings. When the toddler Yuka
continued crying over her mother's body, the defendant threw the child
onto the ground and strangled her with a piece of string.

The defense argued that the forensic evidence does not match the
prosecutors' version of how the murders took place, and that there were no
marks of strangulation on the child's body. The Supreme Court rejected the
defense's argument.

"This ruling is unjust, and it aggressively upholds the use of the death
penalty," defense attorney Yoshihiro Yasuda said later in a statement.
Yasuda is a vocal opponent of capital punishment.

The ruling departs from the precedent set for the death penalty by the
Supreme Court in the case of Norio Nagayama, who was sentenced to hang in
1983 for killing four people when he was 19. Since that case, the number
of victims was viewed as the determining factor in whether to impose the
death penalty.

"If the murderer gets a life sentence this time, it would set the
precedent that if you are a minor, you can avoid capital punishment even
if you kill two people," the victim's husband said. "That's why I am
fighting . . . to prevent this country from setting such a standard."

Death sentences can be handed down to people aged 18 or older under the
Penal Code, but the Juvenile Law states that life imprisonment should be
the sentence if the perpetrator was under 20 when the crime was committed.

(source: The Japan Times)