GEORGETOWN – The Guyana parliament has approved legislation amending the Criminal Law Offences Act that would abolish the death penalty for most murder convictions.
Murder was now classified as capital and non-capital, said Attorney General Charles Ramson, who tabled the legislation.
He called the change “necessary”, saying that that the mandatory death sentence for murder which the country inherited from Britain had become a major human rights issue.
He pointed to the fact that ever since the 1950s, Guyana’s colonial master, Britain, by way of the Homicide Act, abandoned the mandatory death sentence but left it in place for its colonies.
Several leading Western nations on which Guyana depends for political and financial support as well as international financial institutions, earlier this year called on Guyana to abolish the death penalty, and also to scrap legislation against homosexuality and corporal punishment.
Ramson told legislators that the purpose of the amendment was not to determine whether fewer murders would be recorded if executions were removed from the law books, but to offer a more practical approach since some defiant conduct, though fatal, was not always premeditated.
Opposition People’s National Congress Reform legislator Clarissa Riehl said the amendment represented a partial abolition of the death penalty and was sound in that respect. However, she was critical of the categorisation process because it failed to specifically mention gender-based murders among the Category 1 murders.
She said domestic violence-related murders were plaguing the country and that women were being killed in gruesome fashion. Riehl argued that such murders needed to be categorised among the more serious ones outlined in the legislation.
Murders identified in Category 1 include the murders of members in the security forces during the execution of their duties; murders calculated to cause fear in the public, and contract murders; they all attract the death penalty and or a life imprisonment.
Murders considered under Category 2 will attract life imprisonment or another term the court considers appropriate but not less than 15 years. (CMC)
