The Death Penalty Project

Conviction for Murder, the Mandatory Death Penalty and the Reality of Homicide in Trinidad and Tobago

A report by Professor Roger Hood & Dr Florence Seemungal

n 2003, the Death Penalty Project obtained funding from the European Commission and the Global Opportunities Fund of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and commissioned Professor Roger Hood, Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Oxford University and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College Oxford, and Dr Florence Seemungal, a Trinidadian researcher who was a Visiting Scholar at the Centre, to conduct a statistical study of recorded murders and persons indicted for murder in the Republic of Trinidad & Tobago in 1998 - 2002. The research was carried out under the auspices of the Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies and the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford.

Professor Hood and Dr Seemungal studied the details of all cases of homicide recorded by the police as murder in the years 1998 to 2002 and followed them up to the end of 2005, in order to show the outcome of police investigations and prosecutions. A second sample examined the results of all cases in which a person was committed for trial on indictment for murder in the same years. Their study provides, for the first time, an analysis of the kinds of murder that were recorded in Trinidad and Tobago in these years and the extent to which they resulted in a conviction for murder and a mandatory death sentence.

Their report, entitled "A Rare and Arbitrary Fate - Conviction for Murder, the Mandatory Death Penalty and the Reality of Homicide in Trinidad & Tobago", has now been published and was launched at an official reception held at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, on 21st June 2006.

< Trinidad and Tobago is now one of only a few countries in the world where the penalty for all types of murder, whatever the circumstances, is death. In neither the United States of America nor China is the death penalty the mandatory punishment for murder. The exceptionally high rate of murders per head of population in Trinidad and Tobago (now about 30 per 100,000 inhabitants, - 19 times the rate in England and Wales and 16 times the rate in Canada, neither of which have capital punishment) suggests that the retention of the mandatory death sentence is not the solution.

• The certainty of conviction for murder was so low, even among those successfully indicted for murder, that a mandatory death penalty cannot be an effective deterrent to murder.
• Under the system of criminal justice as it operates in Trinidad and Tobago, those who killed in domestic-related disputes were more likely - because it was so much easier to gather evidence against them - to have been convicted of murder and sentenced to death than those who killed in any other circumstances. Even so the chances of a murder conviction being obtained for a domestic killing were not high. The proportion of gang and drug related killings, which often involve assassinations and great cruelty, that resulted in a murder conviction was very low indeed and also where the killing had arisen from an altercation. As a result, there was a great deal of arbitrariness affecting which defendants were convicted of murder and sentenced to death and this meant that a mandatory death sentence was being applied inequitably, without consideration of the differences between murders and the persons convicted of them, and by no means always for the 'worst of the worst' cases.
• The fact that it was so hard to obtain convictions for murder in Trinidad and Tobago may in part be due to the reluctance of witnesses, prosecutors and juries to see persons convicted of murder where there is no flexibility available in the sentence imposed. Thus, the existence of a mandatory death penalty may itself have been one of the factors affecting the ability of the system to secure convictions for murder.