The Jamaica Council of Churches (JCC), while branding the June 21 murder of a mother and her four children in Clarendon as “unwarranted, wanton, and shockingly alarming”, says its members are still “unwilling and unable to support the death penalty”, which is the punishment being sought by State prosecutors in the matter.

On Tuesday, Rushane Barnett, who is charged on five counts for the murders of 31-year-old Kimesha Wright, a practical nursing student and her children — 15-year-old Kimanda Smith, 10-year-old Shara-Lee Smith, five-year-old Rafaella Smith, and 23-month-old Kishawn Henry, all of New Road, Cocoa Piece, Chapelton district, in Clarendon — was served with a death penalty notice when he appeared before Justice Leighton Pusey in the Supreme Court.

At the time, a prosecutor addressing the judge said based on the nature of the allegations the director of public prosecutions had taken the decision to file the death penalty notice under Section 3 (1) of the Offences Against the Person Act. The provision addresses the possible sentences that could be imposed when there are multiple incidences of murder that arise on the same occasion.

But Reverend Newton Dixon, former Council of Churches president who is now general secretary of the body, told the Jamaica Observer that there were multiple reasons for the council’s position.

“One reason is our theological understanding of the sanctity of life. We continue to insist on the fact that, irrespective of the nature of the behaviour of the human being, all life is sacred in God’s eyes. In fact, we cannot let go of the absolute imperative of scripture that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and God, therefore, considers life in all the expressions, whether by race, colour, gender, precious and sacred,” Dixon said.

“So we don’t think it makes sense theologically to affirm life and then create another arena for us to excuse taking life,” he pointed out.

“The second reason is what I would say moves from the area of theology to the area of reason, and where we have an uneasiness is the idea that there is no evidence that we have at our disposal that the use of the death penalty is an effective deterrent against crime,” he said.

“Every human system is ultimately and fundamentally imperfect, and when a system proposes to exact a punishment as final as death, given the fact that, fundamentally, that system is not altogether perfect or foolproof, gives us caution to say we cannot give an imperfect system the carte blanche authority to take life. And the truth is, there is both anecdotal evidence and some amount of empirical evidence of miscarriage of justice,” Dixon added.

He, in the meantime, made it clear that the JCC was not pointing fingers at anyone.

“There are no aspersions being cast on judges; we are just saying the system — because the system has different elements, and if one section of the system fails, then it is going to compromise the entire system. So, if the investigative side fails it might cause a problem in the jurisprudential area,” he explained.

“So we really have to step back a bit and look at a system that is human and consider the possibility of error, and we do know that errors have taken place, and we do think life is not just the kind of sphere in which we can allow that kind of error,” Dixon continued.

“We can allow margins of error in statistical surveys, but we can’t allow margins of error with somebody’s life. So, for those reasons, we are unwilling and unable to support the death penalty,” the JCC general secretary stated.

He was, however, quick to point out that having taken that stance, the council was in no way out of touch with the feelings of people affected by crime.

“Lest we be pilloried for being people with our heads in the clouds and being out of touch with reality, let me hasten to say that the council commiserates and offers condolences and sympathies to every victim of crime, especially those that have suffered the ultimate crime of murder,” he said.

“The council feels the pain of those who suffer and understands how egregious the breach is when someone loses their life, especially the unwarranted, wanton, shockingly alarming case we saw last week in Coco Piece, Clarendon,” Dixon told the Observer.

“We feel it for both the victim and the perpetrator because the perpetrator is in need of God’s grace as much as the victims. They both have rights, the perpetrator has human rights, the victims have human rights; we can’t pit one right against the other,” he said.

He, in the meantime, said the council is “prepared to join with every agency that is interested in and works towards creating the conditions in society that minimise the occurrence of this kind of tragedy…and the conditions that give rise to this kind of deviance”.

“We have worked over the years with both Government and non-government. And now we are looking at how we can create this broad-based template where all hands come on deck and we try to find national initiatives that address communities and what communities face,” Dixon declared.

Capital punishment remains on the books in Jamaica but may only apply in certain aggravated murder convictions. However, there have been no executions since 1988.