Government Senator and consultant psychiatrist Dr Saphire Longmore on Friday doubled down on her call for Jamaica to enforce its death penalty law, particularly for child killers, irrespective of age or gender, arguing that even if individuals are not executed, a message will still be sent.

Longmore had faced some criticism for making that pitch in early December ahead of the sentencing of dental assistant Kayodi Satchell who, in June 2023, snatched eight-year-old Danielle Rowe from her Braeton Primary and Infant School in Portmore, St Catherine, before taking her to a location in St Andrew where she slashed the child’s throat.

On Friday, in making her contribution to the State of the Nation Debate at Gordon House in downtown Kingston, Longmore, stating that she wanted to explain further, said, “I needed to clarify that my position is not because of my ignorance of capital versus non-capital murder or of death penalty not being gender-specific. In my mind, if you kill a child [whether you are] man or woman, you should get the death penalty, even if we are not enforcing it.”

Under Jamaica’s Offences Against the Person Act, the punishment for capital murder is the death penalty. There is, however, one exception as the Act specifically exempts from execution women who are convicted of offences punishable with death, but who are found by a jury to be pregnant.

In that circumstance, the sentence passed on her is set as life imprisonment with or without hard labour.

The last person to be executed in Jamaica was Nathan Foster, who was convicted of murder and hanged in 1988.

Last year the Crown, in prosecuting Satchell, did not seek the death penalty. Jamaica is more or less hamstrung by the precedent set by the ruling of the United Kingdom Privy Council in the case of Trimmingham v The Queen (2009), where it was held that the death penalty should be imposed only in cases which, on the facts of the offence, are “the most extreme and exceptional”, “the worst of the worst”, or “the rarest of the rare”.

“It’s hard for me to speak about Danielle Rowe, it really is, and my position is not based on the fact that I am not cognisant of the norms of our island,” Longmore said on Friday.

“My position is based on the fact that I want meted out to child murderers, the most severe punishment we have on our books. Mi nuh know what needs to happen, but if somebody murders a child, especially in the premeditated way, they should not even be considering that they have the chance of seeing sunlight again,” Longmore argued.

“We don’t enforce the death penalty, I know, but it is still on our books, so mek wi use it to get the message across: ‘Leave our children alone.’ Allow them the chance to become the Jamaican citizen that is capable of changing the world. We have had so many examples of this,” she declared.

Longmore, who said the trauma from these killings spread far and wide, emphasised that another painful aspect is that “the system is structured in such a way that the murderer is more guaranteed care” than those who are directly affected by the situation — parents, siblings, classmates, ordinary citizens.

“When you have a lot of trauma like, for example, a trauma that happens at school, one-third of the persons will immediately react and show a response; one-third, in about six months it will come; and then another third will probably not be affected at all. Out of every 10, one person will probably grow from that trauma,” she said.

“And so, I encourage us in our dispensation of health care to seek post-traumatic growth as an objective and resiliency factor, especially amongst our children,” Longmore added.

Satchell, who had confessed to killing Danielle, was in late December sentenced to life in prison for the murder of the eight-year-old and will be eligible for parole after serving 27 years and four months.