WITH dental assistant Kayodi Satchell days away from learning the penalty she will be given for luring eight-year-old Danielle Rowe from her school in June last year and murdering her, psychiatrist Dr Sapphire Longmore says it is time for Jamaica to contemplate enforcing its death penalty laws, particularly for child killers, irrespective of age or gender.

“The pitch that I am making if any, is that we need to have a fundamental recognition of the need to protect our children, I think that we need to recognise as a society that they are the most vulnerable and the least we can do is send the message of that protection for our children. So if a child is murdered in a premeditated way, especially in a heinous act, I think irrespective of gender, colour, class, whatever, that individual should face the death penalty, even if the perpetrators themselves are a child,” Longmore told the Jamaica Observer on Wednesday.

Longmore, in making it clear that she was speaking as an individual and not a government senator, said: “If an eight-year-old, nine-year-old or ten-year-old in some way commits a crime, they will not get the same punishment as a 15-year-old or a 16-year-old or an adult, but I think we need to send the message with what is happening with our children and the level of inhumanity that we are seeing, especially in a case like this where the child was taken from school.”

Under Jamaica’s Offences Against the Person Act, the punishment for capital murder is the death penalty. There is, however, one exception as the Act specifically exempts from the death penalty female offenders who are convicted of offenses punishable with death, but who are found by a jury to be pregnant. Where a woman convicted of an offence punishable with death is found to be pregnant, the sentence passed on her is set as imprisonment with or without hard labour for life. The last person to be executed in Jamaica was Nathan Foster, who was convicted of murder and hanged in 1988.

The Crown in prosecuting Satchell did not seek the death penalty against her. Jamaica is more or less hamstrung by the precedent set by the ruling of the United Kingdom-based Privy Council in the case of Trimmingham v The Queen (2009) where it was held that the death penalty should be imposed only in cases which, on the facts of the offence, are “the most extreme and exceptional”, “the worst of the worst”, or “the rarest of the rare”.

Satchell, by her own admission, snatched Rowe from the Braeton Primary and Infant School in Portmore, Catherine, on June 8, 2023 and took her to a location in St Andrew where she fed her a meal before slashing her throat. The mortally wounded child was found by a member of the Jamaica Defence Force on Roosevelt Avenue in St Andrew. She succumbed to her injuries in hospital two days later on June 10. In September this year, Satchell pleaded guilty to the acts which caused widespread horror and outrage.

Her attorney Pierre Rogers, in making a plea for leniency for the confessed killer, on Monday before Supreme Court judge Justice Carolyn Tie-Powell in the Home Circuit Division of the Supreme Court in downtown Kingston, said his client’s actions were a desperate cry for help.

The attorney, while emphasising that there was no justifiable reason for the murder of anyone, especially a child, said the act was triggered when Satchell, who was in “a stormy and unfortunate relationship” with Danielle’s father, was informed by him, via a social media message which simply said, “If yuh know wah good fi yuh, yuh go test yu self fi HIV”.

Rogers said Satchell was disturbed by the callous way in which that disclosure was made, amplified by the fact that she was pregnant. He said his client, because of the situation, had to contend with an aborted second trimester pregnancy.

The attorney said his client, having undergone all that she had, was of the view that it was “a child for a child”.

Wednesday, Longmore, in brushing aside the attorney’s indications that doctors and psychiatrists were able to confirm that Satchell suffered what is called an “adjustment disorder”, said the woman should not even be given mental health care behind bars.

“Adjustment disorder is an acute reaction it does not cause you to lose touch with reality; yes, you might have some anxiety or depression. That is not an excuse for what she did. Mental health care for what? You imagine this child’s mother, her classmates, her siblings? This woman should not see the light of day again,” Longmore said.

She is also contending that other factors outside of being jilted by her partner fuelled Satchell.

“I don’t think this is just about HIV, there is more to that. The mind that we are dealing with, remember the level of search that was happening for Danielle, there was a huge search, and she had the child, knew all of that and still proceeded to do what she did. There is another angle to this, there is no court when it comes to a broken heart and it is the sense of injustice when we get emotionally involved with someone and there is some form of betrayal,” Longmore stated.

“When people are involved in these emotionally charged situations, when you have your heart invested, and it gets betrayed or is broken, people can be very, very angry because there is no justice there.

“Everywhere else where somebody wrongs you, you might be able to get justice but in that there is none and that is probably what triggered this,” she added.

Said Longmore: “Persons may say I am approaching from an emotional standpoint with my position that she should get the death penalty; yes, I am a government senator, a psychiatrist, a mother, but as any citizen of this country who has a collective responsibility for protecting our children, I think we need to send the message.”.

“It is not about being emotional, it is about being a citizen, forget senator, forget psychiatrist, forget mother. As a citizen ensuring and enabling as best as possible, we collectively protect our children and reflect that as our standard,” Longmore said further.