Trinidad & Tobago | Four convicted killers removed from death row

FOUR convicted killers housed in the condemned section of the Port of Spain prison at Frederick Street for decades have had their death sentences vacated.

In declaring that any attempt to carry out the death sentence on the four would be in contravention of their constitutional rights, Justice Margaret Mohammed ordered that they be immediately removed from death row.

She also ordered that the four be resentenced by a judge in the Criminal Assizes.

Mohammed will also assess damages due to them for the breaches of their rights at a later date and ordered their attorneys to file submissions on the issue in November 2023 and January 2024.

The orders were made on Friday.

The four who will now receive compensation from the State for the lengthy delay to execute them are Garvin Sookram, Jay Chandler, Keron Lopez and Mukesh Chandradath, who each filed constitutional motions alleging their rights were beached.

They are represented by attorneys Gerald Ramdeen, Wayne Sturge, Dayadai Harripaul and Nerisa Bala.

Each man presented the court with an affidavit detailing their complaints. Sookram, 48, has been on death row for 14 years, five months and six days, awaiting execution.

Chandler, 44, has been in the condemned section for 12 years; Lopez for 14 years, five months and six days and Chandradath for 12 years, two months and 19 days.

The men said being on death row for more than a decade has robbed them of the opportunity to prove to a court that they have served a satisfactory period of time to satisfy the requirements of retribution and deterrence.

“I would like an opportunity to prove to a court of law that I have served a proportionate and just punishment that equates to the crime that I was found guilty of committing,” one of the men said in their affidavits.

They said they all feared that if the court did not intervene, the State would continue to detain them indefinitely.

“ I have suffered and continue to suffer and will continue to suffer at the hands of the State unless this court intervenes in this matter,” the judge was told.

Sookram, a reputed gang leader from Sawmill Avenue, Barataria, and his partner, Lopez, were convicted on March 2, 2009, of the murders of Kerwin "Richie" Hinds, and Kerwin "Ox" Cyrus, on July 28, 2004, at Sawmill Avenue, Barataria.

Chandler was sentenced to death on August 11, 2011, for the murder of Kirn Phillip on October 8, 2004. Phillip died after being stabbed, while both men were serving sentences at Golden Grove Prison, Arouca.

In 2021, Chandler urged the Privy Council to declare this country’s mandatory death penalty for murder as unconstitutional.

In May, last year, nine law lords ruled on the landmark case, pronouncing that the death penalty would remain on TT’s statute books as the punishment for murder.

Although it held that the punishment was cruel and unusual, they said it was not unconstitutional.

Trinidad is the last country in the English-speaking Caribbean to retain the mandatory death penalty for murder and the case reignited the debate on the death penalty.

In their ruling, the nine judges reproached TT for keeping the hangman’s noose.

“It is striking that there remains on the statute book a provision which, as the government accepts, is a cruel and unusual punishment because it mandates the death penalty without regard to the degree of culpability.”

Chandradath was convicted of murdering Selwyn Grant, 65, and his 70-year-old wife Ursula Innis at their home at Allen Drive, Syne Village, Penal in 2011.

The couple’s decomposing and headless bodies were discovered by their grandson on September 16, 1999.

Grant was found under an abandoned tank in the yard and his head was found in a bag secured by wire. Innis’ body was found in a bathtub in the bathroom, while her severed head was found in a bag floating in a water tank.

Chandradath filed a malicious prosecution and false imprisonment claim seeking $1 billion in compensation which was unanimously rejected by the Court of Appeal in 2019.

Source: newsday.co.tt, Staff, August 21, 2023

_____________________________________________________________________

FOLLOW US ON:

CONTACT: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

Boston Marathon bomber’s appeal of death sentence marked by delays and secrecy

As the city marks the 12th anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sits on federal death row for admittingly detonating bombs at the finish line that killed three people and injured more than 260 others. Yet, his fate remains uncertain after a decade of legal wrangling, as his lawyers continue to challenge his death sentence. The federal judge who presided over his 2015 trial was ordered by an appeals court in March 2024 to investigate defense claims that two jurors were biased and should have been stricken from the panel. If he finds they were, then Tsarnaev is entitled to a new trial over whether he should be sentenced to life in prison or death, according to the appeals court.

Singapore executes man for 2017 murder of pregnant wife and daughter

Teo Ghim Heng, who strangled his pregnant wife and four-year-old daughter in 2017 before burning their bodies, was executed on 16 April 2025 after exhausting all legal avenues. His clemency pleas were rejected and his conviction upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2022. Teo Ghim Heng, who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and their four-year-old daughter in 2017, was executed on 16 April 2025. The Singapore Prison Service confirmed that Teo’s death sentence was carried out at Changi Prison Complex. In a news release on the same day, the police stated: “He was accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel both at the trial and at the appeal. His petitions to the President for clemency were unsuccessful.”

USA | They were on federal death row. Now they may go to a supermax prison.

A group of federal prisoners filed a lawsuit this week accusing the Trump administration of seeking to move them to a supermax prison to face tougher conditions as punishment for having their death sentences commuted by President Joe Biden. President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life in prison without parole. After his inauguration, Trump ordered that the former death row prisoners be housed “in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”

USA | Who are the death row executioners? Disgraced doctors, suspended nurses and drunk drivers

These are just the US executioners we know. But they are a chilling indication of the executioners we don’t know Being an executioner is not the sort of job that gets posted in a local wanted ad. Kids don’t dream about being an executioner when they grow up, and people don’t go to school for it. So how does one become a death row executioner in the US, and who are the people doing it? This was the question I couldn’t help but ask when I began a book project on lethal injection back in 2018. I’m a death penalty researcher, and I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day. Part of the riddle was who is performing these executions.

Indonesia | British grandmother who has spent 12 years on death row hugs grandchildren for first time as they visit Bali prison

Lindsay Sandiford, 68, reportedly shared 'cuddles and kisses' with her loved ones for the first time in years A British grandmother who has been stuck on death row in Bali for more than a decade has been reunited with her loved ones for the first time in years. Lindsay Sandiford has been locked up in Indonesia's notorious Kerobokan Prison since 2013 after being found guilty of trying to smuggle £1.6million of cocaine into the country.

Indiana Supreme Court sets May 20 execution date for death row inmate Benjamin Ritchie

The condemned man has exhausted his appeals but is likely to seek a clemency plea. Indiana Supreme Court justices on Tuesday set a May 20 execution date for death row inmate Benjamin Ritchie, who was convicted in 2002 for killing a law enforcement officer from Beech Grove. The high court’s decision followed a series of exhausted appeals previously filed by Ritchie and his legal team. The inmate’s request for post-conviction relief was denied in Tuesday’s 13-page order, penned by Chief Justice Loretta Rush, although she disagreed with the decision in her opinion.

Louisiana to seek death penalty for child killer despite Biden’s commutation

CATAHOULA PARISH, La. — While a federal death row sentence has been reclassified by former President Joe Biden to life without parole, the State of Louisiana still seeks the death penalty for a man convicted of the kidnapping, torturing and murdering a child in Catahoula Parish. According to a statement by the Seventh Judicial District of Louisiana District Attorney Bradley Burget, on Monday, a Catahoula Parish Grand Jury indicted Thomas Steven Sanders for the first-degree murder of 12-year-old Lexis Kaye Roberts in 2010.

Texas executes Moises Mendoza

Moises Sandoval Mendoza receives lethal injection in Huntsville for death of 20-year-old Rachelle O’Neil Tolleson A Texas man convicted of fatally strangling and stabbing a young mother more than 20 years ago was executed on Wednesday evening. Moises Sandoval Mendoza received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville and was pronounced dead at 6.40pm, authorities said. He was condemned for the March 2004 killing of 20-year-old Rachelle O’Neil Tolleson.

Afghanistan | Four men publicly executed by Taliban with relatives of victims shooting them 'six or seven times' at sport stadium

Four men have been publicly executed by the Taliban, with relatives of their victims shooting them several times in front of spectators at a sport stadium. Two men were shot around six to seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the centre of Afghanistan's Badghis province, witnesses told an AFP journalist in the city. The men had been 'sentenced to retaliatory punishment' for shooting other men, after their cases were 'examined very precisely and repeatedly', the statement said. 'The families of the victims were offered amnesty and peace but they refused.'

In Alabama, a Volunteer to Die

James Osgood has been executed by the State of Alabama. Read an eyewitness account. There were no protestors today on the side of Highway 21 in Atmore, Alabama, outside Holman Correctional Facility where the state would soon begin its execution of James Osgood. Instead, under a cloudy spring sky, a few guard trucks were parked at the prison’s first gate, lonely in the grassy plains. Before, at the state’s previous killings, protestors have often flanked the roadside nearest those trucks, their dissenting bodies one of the few signals in the landscape of the death about to occur inside the prison’s gates.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog