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Attorneys Kenyatta Powell and Oswest Senior-Smith
Attorney Kenyatta Powell says the threshold which needs to be met for a person to be sentenced to death in Jamaica remains unclear.
The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions on Tuesday served a notice of death penalty on 23-year-old Rushane Barnett who is accused of killing a woman and her four children in Clarendon.
That move has stirred debate in the country regarding the death penalty.
Mr. Powell says a key challenge for the DPP getting the death penalty is the 2010 ruling in the Trimmingham case in which the Privy Council said the death penalty should be imposed only in cases where the offences are the most extreme and exceptional.
In that case, which took place in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the convicted man had decapitated the victim and robbed him of his goats but the court said that did not rise to the level of "worst of the worst and the rarest of the rare".
For Mr. Powell, this Trimmingham standard is opaque and "unhelpful beyond saying practically nothing in Jamaica would fall into the standard".
The attorney argued that Jamaica has been left with a "zombie" death penalty because while it technically remains legal, "the judicial guardrails placed around when it can actually be imposed has made it almost functionally abolished".
Mr. Powell concluded that Jamaica needs to either abolish the death penalty or put in place specific guidelines for which offences can attract that punishment.
Another attorney, Oswest Senior-Smith, suggested the circumstances which constitute the "worst of the worst" can be laid out by the courts when specific cases are tried.
He noted that there are indeed some circumstances that are "entirely outstanding and are different from the norm". In such cases, he believes one would be in no doubt that is it "the worst of the worst or the most egregious or flagrant circumstances that would incur the death penalty".
Both Oswest Senior-Smith and Kenyatta Powell were speaking Wednesday evening on Radio Jamaica's Beyond the Headlines.
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