Jan. 10
THE NETHERLANDS/INDONESIA:
Netherlands to fight Indonesian death sentences
The Dutch Foreign Ministry has announced that the Netherlands will pay the
legal costs for 2 Dutch citizens who have been sentenced to death in
Indonesia for allegedly producing the party drug ecstasy. The Foreign
Ministry says that, for one, the Netherlands opposes the death penalty.
Secondly, there are also strong indications that the 2 did not receive a
fair trial. The Netherlands has decided it will help the 2 appeal the
sentence.
(source: Radio Netherlands)
PHILIPPINES:
Rosales on death penalty: Forgiveness, not execution
Christian forgiveness and not execution is the way to deal with a crime,
Manila archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales said late Friday.
Rosales said this as he joined other Catholic Church officials in
rejecting suggestions to revive the death penalty law in the wake of the
"Alabang Boys" illegal-drug scandal.
"Let them decide but the position of the Church is this: thou shall not
kill. Therefore, if a person commits an error or a crime, there's such a
thing as Christian forgiveness ... Jesus forgives and that's it," Rosales
said in an article on the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines
website.
Capital punishment is not compatible with Christian values and the
Catholic Church is firm in its position against it, he said.
Several sectors called for the revival of the capital punishment in the
country after allegations of bribery and the use of connections in seeking
the release of three scions of rich families who were linked to the drug
trade.
But Rosales said that forgiveness is a mark of the Christian faith, which
no crime could erase.
He added the death penalty is not a deterrent to crimes, and that this
fact has been proven even in other countries.
Earlier, CBCP Episcopal Commission on Prison Pastoral Care (ECPPC) said a
dysfunctional judicial system and police force are among the reasons for
the growing drug menace in the country.
(source: GMA News)
ST. KITTS:
Return of the noose: St Kitts has just hanged its first man for a decade
and believes it is the only way to beat violent crime
They came for the condemned man on the stroke of midnight. But for Charles
Elroy Laplace there was no slap-up last supper of the type served on death
row in America, nor the company of a reassuring pastor.
Instead, he was bound hand and foot and cast on to a grubby mattress in
the corner of his fetid cell, then left for 8 hours to contemplate his
impending fate.
Paralysed and rendered incontinent with fear, Laplace lay there all night,
begging the Lord for mercy and pleading for someone to call his mother or
his lawyer - anyone who might save him at the last.
But his wretched entreaties were drowned out by the singing of his prison
guards, who saw fit to celebrate his coming execution with a rum-fuelled
'gallows party' that lasted long into the small hours.
It was not until 8am the following morning that Laplace's torment was
finally brought to an end. As the death knell tolled in Her Majesty's
Prison, Basseterre, capital of the Caribbean islands of St Kitts & Nevis,
and a crowd gathered outside the forbidding crimson gates, he was
frogmarched ten paces to an ancient wooden gallows inside the jail.
Built for multiple hangings, the gibbet had 3 separate nooses and
Laplace's head was covered with a white hood and placed in one of them.
The 40-year-old bakery van driver just had time to wish his six children a
happy life and mutter his forgiveness for the trial judge who had
sentenced him to death, before the lever was thrust forward and the boards
fell away beneath him.
Soon news of his execution spread through the island and his murdered
wife's family raised a triumphal flag - then the rum began to flow again.
This probably sounds like some gruesome scene from the West Indies of
bygone days, when ruthless white sugar plantation bosses routinely lynched
their troublesome black serfs on these shores, often in public to set an
example.
Yet although the gallows where Laplace was dispatched were, indeed, built
in the mid-19th century, in fact this most unmerciful execution took place
just three weeks ago.
The macabre ritual was described to me this week, with shockingly
dispassionate candour, by the hangman who dispatched Laplace, a local
character named Simeon Govia.
Unshaven and gaunt, Mr Govia, aged 47, is no master executioner in the
Albert Pierrepoint mode, of that we can be sure.
In fact, he admits that he was hired because he has family ties to a
senior prison official, performed his first execution after a 5-minute
'lesson' from an officer, and had no idea what would happen until his
victim fell.
Small wonder, for he usually makes his living by massaging British female
tourists on the beaches of this supposedly idyllic volcanic outcrop (and
bedding them where possible, he told me with a gap-toothed grin).
He claims he volunteered for the job of St Kitts official hangman - a role
that has been vacant for ten years since the last execution was carried
out here - because he believes passionately in 'an eye for an eye'.
However, as he charges just 30 for providing his sensual rub-downs and the
government offered him a fee of 1,800 to dispatch Laplace, perhaps that
was not the only reason why this roving gigolo was so keen to make a
temporary career switch.
'That guy went as good as gold, man,' Mr Govia told me.
'He didn't whimper or holler. He was very brave and knew he had to go
through with it. He didn't suffer, either. I pushed the lever and he was
gone in an instant.'
Had he suffered nightmares the night before he did the deed?
'No man. The guards put me in a room and gave me a tot of whisky and nice
food, and I slept sound. There are eight more guys on death row, and when
they want me to hang the next one I'll be more than ready to oblige.'
That day will surely come very soon. For despite recent U.S. research
suggesting that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent to
murder, and a worldwide trend towards its abolition, senior politicians in
St Kitts & Nevis are convinced it is the only effective answer to the
violent crime epidemic sweeping the island.
A generation ago, murders were a rarity here. Now this tiny Commonwealth
country - Britain's first colony in the Caribbean - is in the grip of a
terrifying gang war which has made it, statistically, the murder capital
of the world, with a record 23 killings last year among a population of
just 46,000. It is highly unlikely that Prime Minister Denzil Douglas will
mention this unwanted distinction this morning when he makes a speech at
the airport to welcome the first holidaymakers off the inaugural British
Airways flight direct to St Kitts.
However, with the sugar industry having recently collapsed and the pair of
islands - which measure just 23 miles long by 5 miles wide - now totally
dependent on tourism, Mr Douglas is acutely aware that the murder of just
1 foreign visitor could spell disaster for the economy.
If he has any doubts as to its likely effects, he need only look to
neighbouring Antigua, where empty hotel rooms and half-deserted beaches
are the legacy of last summer's brutal shooting of Welsh honeymoon couple
Ben and Catherine Mullany.
With the credit crunch taking a toll on winter bookings in the Caribbean,
similar fears are gripping leading politicians throughout the
crime-plagued West Indian archipelago.
And so, ignoring a clamour of protest led by Amnesty International and
other human rights organisations, they are dusting down gallows that have
stood idle for decades, ready to resume hanging on a scale not seen since
the most draconian days of British rule.
These former colonies are now fiercely independent nations, of course, but
they have retained the British legal system, and although capital
punishment for murder was finally abolished in their mother country 40
years ago, it has remained on their statute books.
Death sentences have therefore continued to be handed down for the most
gruesome killings for many years - but they are often set aside by the
Privy Council in London, which remains the final court of appeal for many
Commonwealth countries.
For a variety of reasons, the Privy Council often rules capital punishment
'unconstitutional'.
And if defence lawyers can drag a case on for more than five years,
hanging is commuted to life imprisonment on humanitarian grounds because
the murderer is deemed to have suffered enough while waiting on death row.
Now, though, many Caribbean nations are sick of seeing their courts
undermined by out-of-touch legal overlords in dusty chambers 4,000 miles
away in London, and they are flexing their muscles. Determined to deal
with violent criminals in their own way, a few years ago they set up their
own appeal court - the Caribbean Court of Justice - based in Trinidad.
The idea is that this will eventually replace the Privy Council as the
islands' court of last resort, thus severing their last legal ties with
Britain.
But the transitional process is dragging on interminably and in recent
weeks, the pressure for draconian justice, Caribbean style, has been
rapidly intensifying.
In Jamaica, whose population is barely bigger than that of Birmingham, but
which last year suffered some 1,300 murders - twice as many as in the
whole of Britain - the Senate has just voted to keep hanging on the
statute books.
No one has been hanged there since 1988 but legal experts believe the
drugs-related killing spree has reached such a critical point that it is
sure to be resumed soon.
Meanwhile, on many smaller islands to which the violence is spreading like
a fast-growing tumour, the clamour to bring back the noose grows louder by
the day.
In St Vincent, for example, people are demanding the swift execution of
Shorn Samuel, 35.
He was sentenced to hang a few weeks ago for lassoing a young woman as she
waited at a bus stop, and beheading her with a cutlass, simply because she
rejected his advances.
They are equally eager to string up Patrick Lovelace who was convicted of
the abduction of 11-year-old Lokeisha Nanton.
He raped the little girl, then hanged her from a mango tree. (His
conviction was overturned on a technicality, and his retrial begins on
Tuesday).
'There is an overwhelming call here for capital punishment to be resumed,'
St Vincent journalist Kirby Jackson says.
'There's a sense of frustration that we are bound by the Privy Council,
which is seen as part of an outdated culture.
'Some people don't like hanging because of its historic connotations. They
refer back to the Fifties and Sixties in the southern USA, when a lot of
black people were wrongly hanged. But as a society we have moved on. We
know what is right or wrong in the Caribbean and we are capable of
deciding that for ourselves.'
'We must do something to stop the killing' It is a sentiment I heard
echoed in St Kitts repeatedly this week. Hearing about the subject I was
researching, people have approached me in the streets to argue
passionately for the right to hang criminals without foreign interference.
On his weekly radio phone-in show, Prime Minister Douglas insisted that he
took 'no comfort' in the recent hanging of Laplace - whose lawyers
apparently missed the deadline for an appeal to the Privy Council 'by
mistake'.
It was simply a matter of allowing the law to take its course, he said
solemnly. With an election looming, however, and the premier hoping to win
a historic fourth term in office, he knows which way the wind is blowing.
Even the island's most senior criminal defence lawyer, Methodist pastor
Reginald James, told me he would no longer represent convicted murderers
after completing his current caseload, which includes an appeal for a
pastor's son alleged to have murdered his sister-in-law.
'We have never had so many killings on this island and we must do
something to stop it,' lamented the 68-year-old barrister, adding that as
a Christian and patriot, his conscience no longer allowed him to fight to
spare murderers from the gallows.
Disgorged from the giant cruiseships which dock in Basseterre's scenic
harbour for a few hours' shopping and sightseeing, day visitors may still
believe they really have landed in 'paradise'.
If they were rash enough to venture a few hundred yards up the hill, to
marijuana-scented ghettoes like that around Westbourne Street, however,
they would glimpse a very different place.
Here, gangs who pathetically model themselves on the Crips and Bloods of
Southside Los Angeles - even wearing their blue and red colours - are
embroiled in a turf war the viciousness of which makes inner-city Britain
seem positively tranquil.
'Hanging won't stop nothing. You check?' one man who called himself Bugie
told me indolently.
'It'll just make people do their killing cleaner so they don't get
caught.'
'My son should not have died'
Business owners are so fearful of these characters that they close shops
and offices early to leave for home before the sun sets.
'It's not just that there's crime here - it is the fact it's all so
vindictive,' says Lucille Rawlins, a 52-year-old Birmingham woman whose
parents emigrated to Britain from St Kitts in the Fifties, and who came to
live here 4 years ago.
Mrs Rawlins was hoping for a tranquil life here only to be brutally
mugged.
She and her Kittitian husband are now planning to return to the
comparative safety of the West Midlands.
On Wednesday another British expat, in his 60s, also required hospital
treatment after being beaten by 3 youths during a robbery at his home in
beautiful Frigate Bay.
In desperation the government have just hired a new ' crimebuster',
recently retired FBI chief Mark Mershon, who achieved considerable success
in fighting the gangs in Oakland, California.
In a refrain familiar to many in Britain, Mr Mershon largely attributes
the moral degeneration of St Kitts to the breakdown of family life and the
rise in the number of single mothers.
He has come armed with an impressive action plan and bravely promises a
reduction in the murder rate this year.
Until he gets results, however, Kittitians will pin their faith on the
perceived deterrent effect of the rope.
Charles Laplace was no gangster - if we believe his mother, Naomi
Williams.
He was a 'quiet home-boy' turned temporarily insane by his wife Dian's
infidelity.
'My son should not have died,' she told me, weeping.
'They hanged him out of spite. When I heard they were going to hang him I
walked to the Governor General's house and begged him to spare my son but
he just said he could do nothing. There were all those other criminals.
Why did they have to pick on him?'
The answer, though no one will admit as much, is that the government felt
the need to make a public statement of intent, and his was the easiest
case.
I am assured by well-placed officials that it won't be the last.
1,800 a go is still mighty good money Who, then, will be next to mount the
gallows in HMP
Basseterre? In the rum houses this week, various names were being touted,
including Warrington Phillip, aged 40 - once a local cricket hero who
almost made the West Indies test team. He was recently convicted of
slashing the throat of his wife, Shermel.
According to well-informed sources, the most likely candidate for the
gallows is Romeo 'Buncum' Cannonier, a fearsome criminal for whom many
islanders believe hanging to be far too lenient. In 2004, the hulking
'Buncum' shot dead a police officer who had the temerity to walk through
his 'manor' at the lonely northern end of St Kitts.
He was duly arrested but from his prison cell he ordered a 'hit' on the
informant whose evidence placed him behind bars.
However, locals maintain that he evaded conviction for his most nauseating
crime.
He is said to have abducted a young mother and held her as his sex slave
in a disused house for days before strangling her. He reputedly buried her
2-year-old daughter alive.
The investigation was appallingly mishandled - which is not uncommon here
- and so on that occasion, Cannonier, who is in his mid-30s and whose
father was hanged for some half-remembered murder, swaggered to freedom.
The authorities are said to be determined that he won't cheat justice a
2nd time.
Whether his hanging - if it takes places - will stem the bloody tide of
murders in paradise remains to be seen, though given that 3 people were
shot just a day after the authorities made an example of Charles Laplace,
it seems unlikely.
In the final analysis, perhaps the only real winner will be Simeon Govia,
the gigolo hangman.
In the Caribbean islands the price of life may be all too cheap these days
- but 1,800 a go is still mighty good money.
(source: Daily Mail)
St. LUCIA:
St Lucia to resume hangings as a deterrent to rising murder rates
St Lucia's government says it hopes to resume hangings as a deterrent to
rising murder rates.
According to the Barbados Nation newspaper, Prime Minister Stephenson King
said on Wednesday that the island needed to deal swiftly with those who
had exhausted their appeals.
He did not give specific proposals, but his national security minister
said last week that cases should he heard more quickly and judges should
set execution dates.
According to a Privy Council ruling, St Lucia law limits time on death row
to 5 years. Convicts whose appeals last longer are given life sentences.
St Lucia reported 38 killings last year, 13 more than in 2007 and its last
hanging was in 1995.
St Kitts carried out an execution last month -- the 1st in 10 years -- and
Jamaica by a wide majority passed a motion a few weeks ago to retain the
death penalty because of the increase in homicides.
(source: Caribbean Net News)
