St Vincent PM’s history on hanging not so clear-cut

ONLOOKERS of last week’s crime conference, at which Dr Ralph Gonsalves made a startling call for the resumption of hanging, might have come away feeling the St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister has had a clear-cut, unequivocal history of supporting the death penalty.

He boasted while he was a Roman Catholic and the Pope and his mother were against hanging, he was of a different persuasion.

“I happen to think that both my mother and the Pope were wrong,” Dr Gonsalves said, prompting chuckles from the audience of Caricom leaders and specially invited guests gathered at the Hyatt Regency Trinidad.

“For murder, other than a crime of passion, you should get the death penalty.”

But Gonsalves, 76, and his native country have a far more complex history with this issue than was apparent.

“I have oscillated between the death penalty and no death penalty for a long time,” he confessed in an interview broadcast on NBC Radio St Vincent and the Grenadines on April 12, mere days before his appearance at the Hyatt on April 17. It was only over the last dozen years or so, he said in that radio interview, that his opinions had settled.

Perhaps his earlier doubt had something to do with the fact that the last time the hangman prevailed in his country, an innocent man may have been executed, according to opponents of the death penalty.

Early on February 13, 1995, Douglas Hamlet was hanged for the murder of fisheries officer Fanny Daroux. Hamlet was convicted solely on the evidence of a 14-year-old identification witness who claimed to have seen him from 125 -184 metres away, in rain. An investigating officer also played a role in the ID parade, around which there were troubling questions.

On the same date, brothers Franklin and David Thomas were also executed. None was given more than a weekend’s notice of his execution.

While on April 17, Gonsalves reported people in “taverns” across the region – including this country and Barbados – are overwhelmingly in favour of the death penalty, this was largely not the case in his own country in the year 2009. In that year, 56 per cent of the St Vincent and the Grenadines population rejected, in a referendum, a proposal to change the country’s constitution to pave the way to resume the death penalty.

Gonsalves, the defence attorney

The St Vincent PM also excoriated judges last week for being too beholden to the submissions of defence attorneys appearing before them. Some might note the irony of this, given his own legal career in St Vincent.

Before rising to become his country’s premier, Gonsalves was a lawyer by training. He was famously a defence lawyer in the trial of American couple Jim and Penny Fletcher, who in 1997 were facing the hangman for the murder of a water-taxi operator, Jerome “Jolly” Joseph. The sensational trial – which, interestingly, featured Trinidadian Karl Hudson-Phillips, QC, as the prosecutor – saw the couple acquitted.

The judge, Dubar Cenac, found: “There is no evidence before me, direct or indirect, that the accused committed this act.”

In court, Gonsalves had pointed out that there was no blood, ballistics or circumstantial evidence tying the couple to the murder. Meanwhile, there were troubling reports elsewhere of corruption playing a role in the case, with some believing there was pressure for the crime to be pinned on the couple.

The Kafkaesque situation of a person being hanged without proper evidence is a thing of nightmares for most. It is not inconceivable that the lawyer-turned-politician’s experience of the inner workings of the criminal justice system potentially informed his earlier thinking on capital punishment – earlier thinking which has now apparently vanished.

The very RC upbringing which the St Vincent PM alluded to last week may have even played a stronger role than he let on.

Not only has he been influenced by the teachings of the Pope and his mother, but Gonsalves is also a fervent admirer of the Order of Saint Benedict, which arguably extols a life of routine and non-violence. So much so, he spent ten days at the monastery at Mt St Benedict, Trinidad, later publishing a book, in 2010, called Diary of a Prime Minister: Ten Days among Benedictine Monks.

At the same time, although Gonsalves implied the RC Church has been stridently against the death penalty, in fact, the church has, like him, changed its position over time. Some popes have actually had no problem with the death penalty (Pope Pius XII) and some have even defended it (Pope Pius X).

It was only with the advent of Pope John Paul II that things began to shift. Still, though that pope called for the death penalty to be avoided as much as possible in 1995, the formal catechism was never fully changed under him to oppose the practice outright. For instance, in 2004, Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) said “recourse to capital punishment” would not prevent someone from receiving communion.

The catechism would only be fully changed in 2018 – a few years ago – after the ascendance of the current pope, Francis, who is generally more liberal and openly opposes the death penalty.

Complex issues, simple rhetoric

Gonsalves’s appearance at the two-day symposium on crime as a public health issue was the perfect embodiment of how, amid intense pressure for results and outcomes, nuances and complications are easily erased from public discourse, particularly among politicians, to the detriment of all.

“This question of crime is a complex one,” Gonsalves began by saying.

Still, he proceeded to dismiss the very complicated socio-economic factors now recognised as part and parcel of the phenomenon of law-breaking, saying if people were truly frustrated, more would die by suicide. He also ignored decades of research by lobby groups such as Amnesty International, which has long suggested capital punishment has no real deterrent effect.

And, in perhaps the crudest oversimplification of all, he painted the idea of the abolition of the death penalty as a neo-colonial imposition by “the Europeans,” when it is the opposite. Hanging was a key component of imperial rule, used time and again by colonial masters to punish those guilty of “treason” and various other offences – many of them flimsy and premised on the superiority of the colonial order – purely to maintain power.

The latter point, at least, was alluded to by TT's Prime Minister, even as he too batted for the right to put people on the gallows under the guise of not deterrence but punishment.

Dr Rowley is long on record as a supporter of the death penalty, saying it remains the law. An identical position was held by his predecessor, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, whose administration sought to introduce different degrees of culpability in the offence of murder, with the highest attracting death.

During the first tenure of Patrick Manning, Glen Ashby went to the gallows in highly controversial circumstances in 1994. And during the administration of Basdeo Panday, the floodgates were seemingly opened, with Dole Chadee and his gang of eight and Anthony Briggs being hanged in June 1999. It was just before Panday’s first tenure that Privy Council case law emerged in the early 1990s which effectively limited the practice by stipulating a person should not be hanged after lengthy delays.

Heads agree on other crime issues

If there is little to distinguish local leadership on the issue of capital punishment, it is nonetheless surprising there was seemingly little to differentiate Caricom leaders last week when it came to strategies to respond to crime more generally.

Barbados PM Mia Mottley, also a lawyer by training, joined with Gonsalves in knocking bail for murder. Jamaica PM Andrew Holness joined Mottley in calling out the US on the proliferation of guns.

All the leaders, in the end, closed ranks and backed a call for more US accountability in terms of how its arms trade affects the region.

It was a far cry from the situation a few years ago, when discord seemed to run rife among Caricom leadership, with some holding private meetings with Trump officials to the exclusion of others.

Ultimately, though some of the rhetoric at the symposium left a lot to be desired and though some of it was a rehash of the oversimplifications to which leadership continues to resort, the entire event was nonetheless a hopeful sign that Caricom is, for once, addressing an issue of direct relevance to its citizenry.

And, for better or worse, it is now singing, like Gonsalves before his fight with the Pope, from the same hymn sheet.