THE COURT of Appeal has granted leave for the United Kingdom Privy Council to determine whether the mandatory death sentence imposed on persons convicted of capital murder is constitutional.
Lambert Watson, who was convicted of capital murder, is the appellant. The Government is intervening in the matter because the constitutionality of the death penalty is at issue.
On Monday, the Court of Appeal, after hearing submissions from Michael Hylton, Q.C., Solicitor-General, granted leave for the Attorney-General to intervene in the matter.
Last month, the Court of Appeal ruled in the case of Lambert 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.
KILLED WOMAN AND BABY
However, on the same day that the Court of Appeal handed down its unanimous decision in Watson's case, Justice Downer gave a dissenting judgment in the case to Dale Box, a murder convict, that the death sentence was not mandatory.
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 baby girl 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.
