Mandatory death sentences
This is an excerpt from a report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
Web links to this page are welcome, but formal citations should be to the official report, E/CN.4/2005/7.
63. The legislation of a significant number of States provides for the death penalty to be mandatory in certain circumstances. The result is that a judge is unable to take account of even the most compelling circumstances to sentence an offender to a lesser punishment, even including life imprisonment. Nor is it possible for the sentence to reflect dramatically differing degrees of moral reprehensibility of such capital crimes. Moreover, in some States even the exercise of clemency is automatically precluded in relation to certain crimes, including those that do not involve violence. It is appropriate, therefore, to note a recent judgement of the Privy Council in response to a ruling by the Court of Appeals of Barbados. The relevance of such a case in the present context is that it was decided on the basis of a careful review of international legal standards. The majority of the Court observed that the maintenance of the mandatory death penalty “will … not be consistent with the current interpretation of various human rights treaties to which Barbados is a party”.20
64. On that issue, the minority judgement reached the same conclusion, but went into greater detail:
“[T]he jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee, the Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court has been wholly consistent in holding the mandatory death penalty to be inconsistent with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. … The appellants submitted that ‘No international human rights tribunal anywhere in the world has ever found a mandatory death penalty regime compatible with international human rights norms’, and this assertion has not been contradicted.”21
Conclusions
80. The mandatory death penalty which precludes the possibility of a lesser sentence being imposed regardless of the circumstances, is inconsistent with the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
20 Boyce and Joseph v. The Queen, Privy Council Appeal No. 99 of 2002, Judgement of 7 July 2004, para. 6.
21 Ibid., para. 81 (3).