THE government yesterday brought to Parliament an amendment to the Offences against the Person Act to give judges greater sentencing discretion in capital murder convictions after last July’s ruling by the Privy Council that the death penalty was not mandatory.

Peter Phillips, the national security minister and leader of government business in the House, tabled the Bill and led it through its first reading, but there is yet to be substantial debate on the legislation.

In the July majority ruling, a special nine-member Privy Council panel that included former Jamaican chief justice Edward Zacca, held that while the death penalty was constitutional it was not automatic in cases of capital murder.

“It will, therefore, be open to the court in these cases (where the law authorises the death sentence) either to impose the death sentence or to impose a lesser punishment, depending on the view it takes of the crime which the defendant committed and all the relevant circumstances.”

In a concurrent ruling that tested substantially the same constitutional and ethical principles, the panel upheld the mandatory death sentence in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

Jamaica’s was struck down because of its move a dozen years ago, to take a more humane approach to capital punishment by making the death penalty applicable only to a certain category of murder, with life imprisonment being the penalty for others.

By doing this, the UK-based law lords held, the Jamaican parliament had changed a law that was in effect prior to the island’s independence, which would otherwise have saved the automaticity of mandatory death for murder.

The ruling means that several convicts already on death row will have not to be brought before a judge to determine whether they should die or serve jail time.

That case was brought on behalf of convicted murderer Lambert Watson who was convicted in 1997 for the murder of his common-law wife, Eugenie Samuels and their daughter, Georgina in Hanover. They both died from severe, and multiple stab wounds.

Watson was apparently retaliating because of a child maintenance suit that had been brought against him.

The government, in outlining the objects of the bill, said that it would not only remove the mandatory death sentence and give judges discretionary powers, but would “impose upon the court a duty to specify a period of imprisonment which the offender should serve before becoming eligible for parole”.

The new legislation will also empower courts, before sentencing, to hear submissions, representations and evidence relevant to the issue of the sentence to be passed.