Cause for concern

Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn has expressed concern about the courts deciding policy in this country.

Making his contribution yesterday afternoon to the Offences Against the Person (Amendment) Bill in the Upper House, he said it was the ruling of the Caribbean Court of Justice, which said that the mandatory death penalty was unconstitutional, that led to the changes being made to the laws in this country.

“We must be careful with judges substituting their own opinion for what the law is supposed to be. We have had it before in Pratt and Morgan in the former place of the Privy Council, when they decided
that if a person is sentenced to death and the sentence has not been carried out for five years, then you have to commute. That was never the law of Barbados, that is what the judges made up, [but] judges are not elected to make law,” he said.

Franklyn said he is not at all sorry that the mandatory death penalty has been taken off the table. He said he prefers to “err on the side of caution” and allow people to spend the rest of their natural life
in prison, for example, should it be a case that the person is not guilty of the offence for which he has been convicted.

“I am always wary of the fact that a person could be sentenced to death and executed and then find sometime down the road that it wasn’t him or her as the case maybe, and I am very wary of that. We have seen several instances in other countries where people were in jail for lots of years and then it turned out that they were innocent and I would not want that to happen in Barbados,” he said.

The senator added, “We can have people being sentence to death because people conspire to lie on him, so I rather err on the side of caution”.

But, he believes that the matter regarding whether to keep or get rid of the mandatory death penalty should have been deliberated on by the Parliament or decided via a referendum by the people, but not imposed by the court.

“Mind you, we got a position that I like, but I didn’t like the road how we got there. The courts are legislating and we have to be careful of that,” he stated. (JRT)