Judge again advocates for murder categories

A HIGH COURT judge has again advocated for the categorisation of capital offences, particularly murder.

On Monday, Justice Lisa Ramsumair-Hinds said it was high time for a “tiered approach” for murder indictments which only carry the mandatory death penalty, unlike felony murder, which makes the death penalty discretionary.

Felony murder is categorised as a violent arrestable offence and applies when an offender commits a certain kind of felony and someone is killed in the course of it. It does not carry the automatic death sentence reserved for murder convictions.

Ramsumair-Hinds said there should be categories of murder so that a court can consider guilty pleas.

“I have to respect the separation of powers,” she said, but admitted it was frustrating, especially with a backlog of murder cases in the triple digits to be tried.

The judge’s comments came after she set a January 2024 date for the start of a judge-only trial for a man accused of a 2008 murder.

The accused, she said, has repeatedly expressed interest in pleading guilty, but, the judge added, the court cannot accept that plea.

“There is no optionWe cannot accept the guilty plea. so the trial will have to go on.”

Ramsumair-Hinds expressed a similar sentiment in 2020 after she dispensed with an indictment against a man who, in December 2019, was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser count of manslaughter.

“It is high time we look at the categorisation of capital offences, because they are not all equal. With a categorisation, we might see some more guilty pleas.”

In 2022, the Privy Council said it was “striking” that the death penalty as the punishment for murder, although not unconstitutional, remained on the statute books with no regard to the degree of culpability.

It was critical of this “provision which, as the government accepts, is a cruel and unusual punishment because it mandates the death penalty without regard to the degree of culpability.

"Nonetheless, such a provision is not unconstitutional. The 1976 Constitution has allocated to Parliament, as the democratic organ of government, the task of reforming and updating the law, including such laws,” was the ruling of nine Privy Council judges who were asked to make the death penalty discretionary.