Bz. attorney offers perspective on death penalty

This week, amid the cries of frustration about the level of crime dominating city streets, the call for a return to capital punishment was loud and clear. Even though, the penalty of death is already in black and white on Belizean law books, it’s been more than a decade since anyone on death row has died. While some analysts blame the lengthy appeal process each prisoner is entitled to, tonight one local attorney offers his own perspective on the situation.

Kirk Anderson, Attorney

“I don’t think quite frankly, that there’s anything much more that can be done on this end, meaning in Belize. In the sense, that really and truly the experience shows that the court of appeal deals very quickly with criminal cases and in fact with all cases that are before it. But particularly, they give certain sort of deference to criminal cases and hear those even more quickly than perhaps they might hear civil cases. So really, you find that if a person is convicted of murder in the month of March 2002, the likelihood is that by as early as May 2002, you will have the Court of Appeal sitting on his or her case. And it’s quite possible, that even in that same month of May you may get a judgement, either upholding the conviction, or overturning it as the case may be. So if you’re looking at two months out of five years, really that’s not a problem. At the Privy Council, it may be a bit longer, because you have cases from all over the Commonwealth, so they have a larger case load to deal with there. But at the end of the day, certainly it does not take five years.

And I really can’t see any reason why that can be considered as being a basis, at least in the Belizean context, for having persons on death row for longer than they should be without carrying out the death penalty. I think I should have mentioned earlier, there is a situation, obviously where the government of the day has to make a certain determination as to whether or not it wishes to carry out the death penalty. And so it may very well be that in certainly circumstances, whilst these people are on death row, the government may very well be of the view that they should not carry out the death penalty.”