Privy Council
| DOI | 10.1350/jcla.68.6.484.54145 |
| Published date | 01 November 2004 |
| Date | 01 November 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Privy Council |
Privy Council
Barbados: Constitutionality of Mandatory Death Penalty
Boyce and Joseph vThe Queen [2004] UKPC 32
The appellants were convicted of murder and, in accordance with s. 2 of
the Offences against the Person Act 1994 (re-enacting, without sig-
nificant alteration, earlier provisions), were sentenced to death. Their
appeals against conviction and sentence were dismissed by the Court of
Appeal (2002, unreported, Criminal Appeals Nos 7 and 8 of 2001). They
appealed to the Privy Council on the basis that the trial judge erred in
regarding the death sentence as mandatory.
H
ELD
(
BY A MAJORITY OF
5
TO
4),
DISMISSING THE APPEAL
,the man-
datory death penalty for murder was preserved as an existing law by
s. 26 of the Constitution and was therefore valid notwithstanding its
inconsistency with the prohibition on inhuman and degrading punish-
ments in s. 15.
C
OMMENTARY
This is one of a trilogy of cases heard by an enlarged panel of judges in
order to provide authoritative rulings on the issue of mandatory death
penalties for murder in three Caribbean states: Barbados (Boyce and
Joseph v R[2004] UKPC 32), Trinidad and Tobago (Matthew v The State
[2004] UKPC 33) and Jamaica (Watson v R[2004] UKPC 34). Although
each has been decided under the particular constitutional regime in each
jurisdiction and will be discussed separately, there is some common
ground between them. One feature shared by all three cases is that the
question for resolution was not the wider issue of the lawfulness of the
death penalty itself, but only the narrower issue of whether its man-
datory application to cases of murder was lawful. The answer to this
question divided the Board in Boyce and Joseph, the difference essentially
deriving from the approach taken to the interpretation of the various
legal instruments involved.
Section 1 of the Constitution provides: ‘This Constitution is the
supreme law of Barbados and, subject to the provisions of this Constitu-
tion, if any other law is inconsistent with this Constitution, this constitu-
tion shall prevail and the other law shall, to the extent of the
inconsistency, be void’. Section 15 contains the familiar prohibition on
inhuman or degrading punishment. It was recognised unanimously by
the Board that, following the earlier decision of the Privy Council in
Reyes vThe Queen [2002] UKPC 11, [2002] 2 AC 235, a case from Belize,
the mandatory death penalty was inconsistent with this provision. It is
worth noting at this point that the government of Barbados does not
accept this: this is discussed further below. The mandatory death penalty
in Barbados derived from the inherited common law, was put into
statutory form by s. 2 of the Offences against the Person Act 1868 and
484
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