Attorney-General’s office wants to intervene in murder appeal
The Attorney-General’s office will tomorrow ask the local appellate court for permission to intervene in the case of murder convict Lambert Watson, whose lawyers are planning to challenge the conventional assumption by Jamaican judges that the death penalty is mandatory for capital murder.
The rationale for request to intervene, which will be made alongside the application by Watson’s lawyers for leave to go to the London-based Privy Council is, according to court documents, based on the fact that the constitutionality of the legislation imposing the death penalty is at issue.
“..as principal legal advisor to the Government. it is of paramount importance to make submissions,” government lawyers stressed in the notice of their intention to make the request.
Watson was convicted on June 15, 1999, of the murders of his 24 year-old girlfriend and baby daughter, whom he stabbed to death in retaliation for being sued for child support.
Consequentially, he fell into the first of two categories of murder specified by the Offences Against the Person Act – capital murder, for which the punishment is ‘death in the manner prescribed by law’.
Capital murder, as defined by the over 100 year-old Offences Against the Person Act, refers to:
. contract killings;
. murders of members of the judiciary, security or correctional officers;
. murders as corollaries to arson, sexual offences, burglary or house-breaking, robbery and acts of terrorism;
. murders for reasons attributable to the status of witnesses in civil or criminal proceedings, jurors; and
. multiple murders.
Up to last year, on December 16, when two panels of local appellate court judges addressed the issue in the murder appeals of Watson and another man called Dale Boxx, it had been taken for granted that ‘death in the manner prescribed by law’ meant an automatic death sentence for capital murder convicts.
However, although the decisions to respectively dismiss and uphold the appeals of Watson and Boxx were unanimous, two opinions on the interpretation of the Offences Against the Person Act in relation to the Constitution emerged.
According to local appellate court judge, Henderson Downer, who along with local appellate court judges Seymour Panton and Neville Clarke heard and upheld Boxx’s appeal, for reasons unconnected to the constitutional issue, the death penalty as prescribed by the Offences Against the Person Act had to be interpreted in conjunction with the constitutional right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time in an independent and impartial court.
Consequentially, Downer argued, when the Offences Against the Person Act mandated judges to pass the death sentence “in the manner authorised by law”, it was referring to the law in Section 20 of the Constitution which guarantees “a fair hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial court.”.
Downer also addressed the main contention that the mandatory nature of the death penalty was unconstitutional when examined against the background of the principle of the separation of powers, namely that of the executive and the judiciary.
Simply put, Downer’s argument was that if the separation of powers principle confers the power to make governing laws on the legislature and the power to determine sentences on the judiciary, a mandatory sentence would, in any case, be unconstitutional.
However, while Panton and Clarke, who also heard and dismissed the Watson appeal on a panel headed by Appeal Court president Justice Ian Forte, agreed with Downer’s decision to release Boxx, they parted company with him on his interpretation of the Offences Against the Person Act and the Constitution.
“I do not find it possible to agree with. his treatment of the question of the mandatory nature of the death sentence,” said Panton in his contribution to the Boxx judgment.
Tomorrow, when the case comes up, it is more than likely that the A-G’s office will be given leave to intervene, as is the case with most matters involving important constitutional issues.