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Thread: Guyana

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Guyana

    Guyana’s Parliament is expected to soon debate a controversial bill that would abolish the death penalty and repeal sodomy and cross-dressing laws.

    Ministers say they plan to submit the bill before legislators break for a two-month recess in early August.

    Human Services Minister Jennifer Webster said Saturday that the government also will hold public hearings on the issues.

    The bill already has angered religious groups in the conservative South American country.

    Under criticism, Guyana’s government previously promised United Nations officials they would at least take some of the issues to Parliament.

    The country last hanged a prisoner in 1997. More than 30 convicted criminals remain on death row.

    The country’s laws also allow small fines to be levied for cross-dressing and up to 25 years in prison for people convicted of sodomy.

    http://www.nhregister.com/articles/2...a335874377.txt
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    BREAKING: Former GDF Coast Guardsmen, convicted for murdering goldminer, challenge constitutionality of death penalty

    Two former Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Coast Guardsmen, who were convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of a Bartica-based goldminer in 2009, have filed an appeal on the grounds that the death penalty is unconstitutional.

    The Attorney General has since asked the Full Court of the High Court to intervene in the criminal appeals as they deal with constitutional arguments by ex Coast Guardsmen Deon Greenidge and Sherwin Hart. The Attorney General is seeking to intervene as a party to the Appeal in order to assist the Court with written and oral submissions with a view to aiding the Court in putting all cases and relevant authorities before the Court.

    “This Appeal raises novel and important Constitutional issues which go to the core of Guyana’s Constitutional ethos and it addresses the vexed question of the legality of the death penalty in Guyana,” says Attorney-at-Law and Legal Officer in the State Solicitor’s Office, Ocelisa Marks.

    Greenidge, Hart and Devon Gordon were found guilty for the murder of Kant Ramdass on August 20, 2009 at Caiman Hole, Essequibo River, where they had forced him into a patrol boat and taken him before robbing him of GYD$17M in cash he had been transporting for his employer. They then dumped him overboard.

    Greenidge and Hart have hired Trinidad and Tobago Senior Counsel, Douglas Mendes and Guyanese lawyers, Nigel Hughes and Latchmie Rahamat to ask the Full Court to find that the death penalty on Guyana’s lawbooks violates the country’s constitution.

    In their latest grounds of appeal filed in November 2020, Greenidge and Hart contend that the death penalty is unlawful and contravenes Guyana’s constitution that describes the country as a democratic state, provides for the right to a happy, creative and productive life), which fall outside the scope of any savings clause, and provides for a free-standing right to life and human dignity which prohibits the imposition of the death penalty and which is separately enforceable and and out-with the scope of the general savings clause.

    The appellants also want the Court to rule that the imposition of the death penalty is a breach of the constitutional prohibition against “inhuman and degrading punishments or other treatment” within Article 141 of the Constitution for reason that i. Capital punishment offends against the evolving standings of humanity, as demonstrated by domestic and international state practice, an ever expanding body of judicial opinion recognizing that the death
    penalty is cruel and/or inhuman, and the increasing momentum of international law towards abolition.

    Greenidge and Hart say that the execution of the death penalty following a lengthy de-facto moratorium would be contrary to Guyana’s binding international law obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Politocal Rights (ICCPR). They say that the imposition of a penalty which cannot be lawfully effected is itself cruel and unusual in breach of Article 141 of the Constitution. Further, they argue that the death penalty is not shielded from inconsistency with Article l4l by virtue of any savings clause (whether the specific clauses within Articles l4l(2) or the general savings clause in Article 152) for reason that i. The relevant legislation does not have the character of “existing lad’ within the meaning of Article 152 (the general savings clause). They say that the the court has both a power and a duty to modify relevant legislation lo ensure it is rendered consistent with fundamental rights and principles of the Constitution.

    The purported exemption for the death penalty within the protection of the right to life in Article 138(1) provision cannot prevent the death penalty being held to be inconsistent with other Articles of the constitution because Article 138 (l ) has been amended by virtue of evolving state practice and the developing interpretation of international law instruments scheduled to the Constitution such that it prohibits the intentional deprivation of life without exception for the imposition of capital punishment.

    The convicts want to convince the Court that the exemption under Article 183(l ) is otiose in any event as the death penalty cannot be lawfully imposed, and consequently there are no lawful sentences of death to be executed to which Article 138(1) might apply.

    https://demerarawaves.com/2021/04/01...death-penalty/
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    Godbrother sentenced to death for 2015 murder of British teen

    By Bebi Oosman
    The Stabroek News

    Aaron Hing was on Friday sentenced to death for murdering his godbrother, British teenager Dominic Bernard, in 2015 at Kildonan, Corentyne.

    The death sentence was handed down by Justice Sandil Kissoon at the High Court in Berbice, immediately after Hing was found guilty by a jury.

    Hing, who was represented by attorney Sanjeev Datadin, had initially pleaded guilty to the crime at his first High Court appearance. However, after a summary of the case was read, Justice Sandil Kissoon was forced to enter a not guilty plea for Hing, who labelled himself a victim in the matter and implicated co-accused Staymon George. George, after pleading guilty to the crime last month, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 35 years.

    https://www.stabroeknews.com/2021/11...-british-teen/
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  4. #4
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Guyana court sentences two pirates to death for 2018 attack

    AP

    A Guyanese court handed down death sentences for two men found guilty of high seas piracy attacks that killed seven fishermen off the nation’s coast in 2018, and authorities said they have broken the back of a deadly group that preyed on fishermen for years.

    Nakool Manohar, 45, and Premnauth Persaud, 48, were convicted of masterminding an attack on a group of fishing vessels in waters near the neighboring South American country of Suriname in a row over access to prime fishing grounds. Seven fishermen perished, while about a dozen others were rescued after drifting on the waters for days.

    Police said some of the men were thrown overboard with their hands tied or weighed down with boat batteries. Others were reportedly chopped with machetes or burned with hot engine oil and tossed into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

    Sentencing the men on Tuesday after a jury returned guilty verdicts, Justice Navindra Singh described the attacks as heinous, saying he found “no reason not to impose the death sentence."

    “It would be reckless and irresponsible of the court to allow them to be released into society at any time,” the judge said.

    He called their actions “gruesome, heinous and cold-blooded” as he imposed death by hanging.

    The men can appeal the ruling to the local court of appeals and also to the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice, which is the final court for Guyana. Their lawyer declined to comment Thursday on their plans.

    While death by hanging is still on local law books, no one has been hanged in Guyana since 1997 and authorities have made no effort to enforce death sentences imposed by courts. More than a dozen people are on death row in Guyana, some sentenced as far back as two decades ago.

    Authorities have so far resisted lobbying efforts from the European Union and other international rights groups to scrub hanging from the law books. In some cases, appeal courts have commuted sentences to life in prison as those on death row simply bide their time behind bars.

    Until the April 2018 attack, authorities had been battling such attacks along the southeastern coast with Suriname and less frequently in the northwest near Venezuela. Police at the time blamed Venezuelan gangs for the attacks.

    Police figures recorded almost 30 deaths from piracy in the past decade. But police regional commander Shiv Bacchus told The Associated Press on Thursday that piracy had not been a major problem in the Berbice border region with Suriname since the arrest of the suspects.

    “For all of last year we had none. For this year, none as well. I must admit that the arrest and sentencing of those responsible had led to a 100% reduction,” Bacchus said.

    Police also credit the arrest and jailing of several Guyanese pirates in Suriname in the past decade for the dramatic decline in incidents.

    https://abcnews.go.com/International...ttack-96862359
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Guyana: Police search for escaped convicted murderer & death row inmate

    On Friday, law enforcement officials in Guyana launched a hunt for convicted murderer and death row inmate Mark Royden Durant, who escaped from the Mazaruni Prison in Region 7, which is located on the left bank of the Mazaruni River.

    Durant, also known as Royden Williams and “Smallie,” escaped with the “assistance of external persons,” according to the Guyana Prison Service (GPS).

    On September 1, 2022, Williams was convicted of the murder of Guyana Defence Force (GDF) member Ivor William, 24, in Buxton on January 23, 2008.

    Prior to that, he was found guilty and condemned to death on eight charges of murder in the 2008 Bartica massacre in 2017. He, on the other hand, has challenged both his sentence and conviction.

    According to media reports, Williams had already escaped from prison during a disturbance at the Georgetown Prison in July 2017.

    Williams was acquitted of the 2007 murder of Kumar ‘Mango Man’ Singh by a 12-member jury in 2019.

    He was acquitted of two counts of murder in 2022 after a jury judged him not guilty of killing two men during an armed robbery at a pub on Agriculture Road in Triumph, East Coast Demerara, in 2007.

    https://www.stvincenttimes.com/guyan...th-row-inmate/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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