By Barbara Gayle, Staff ReporterTHE CONTROVERSIAL mandatory death sentence imposed on persons convicted of capital murder is to be decided by the United Kingdom.
Lawyers representing Lambert Watson, one of the prisoners challenging the death sentence, will be going to the Court of Appeal next week for leave to take the matter to the Privy Council.
Last month, the Court of Appeal handed down a unanimous decision in the case of Watson that the mandatory death sentence was not unconstitutional and emphasised that it was the extremely violent murder cases over the last 12 years which necessitated the retention of the death sentence.
However, in the case of Dale Boxx, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang, Justice Downer said in his dissenting judgment last month that the death sentence was not mandatory.
BRUTAL DOUBLE MURDER
Watson, a labourer, of Anchovy, St. James, was convicted in the Hanover Circuit Court on June 15, 1999 of the September 1997 murders of his nine-month-old daughter and her 24-year-old mother. He fatally stabbed Georgiana Watson and Eugenie Samuels, of Anchovy, because Samuels had sued him for child support. The bodies with multiple stab wounds were found in bushes at Knockalva, Hanover, on September 18, 1997. Watson was convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to hang.
Watson appealed to the United Kingdom Privy Council against his murder convictions and death sentence. While his appeal was being heard, he filed a supplementary petition contending that the mandatory sentence of death was unconstitutional. He also claimed that he should have been given a hearing before the death sentence was passed.
The Privy Council dismissed Watson's appeal against his convictions but sent back the case for the Court of Appeal to make rulings on the points raised.
In dismissing Watson's appeal last month, the Court of Appeal, comprising Ian Forte, president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Seymour Panton and Justice Neville Clarke (acting), held that Watson was not entitled to a hearing to challenge the death sentence because "the constitutionality of the mandatory death sentence cannot be challenged".
The court said that in 1992 when Parliament made provisions for two categories of murder and retained the death penalty for capital murder, Parliament must "have weighed in a general way, the proportionality of murders committed in those well-considered and defined areas against the finality of the death penalty."
