THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL

WEDNESDAY; JUNE 9, 1999

Sudden Spate Of Executions Is Sweeping Caribbean

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, June 8 (Reuters) - Defying international pressure to abolish the death penalty, a number of Caribbean countries seem more determined than ever to execute prisoners as a deterrent to violent crime.

Nine convicted killers have been hanged in Trinidad and Tobago since Friday, despite pleas from Britain to end executions, and the hangings seem to have added momentum in other Caribbean nations to send inmates to the gallows.

Jamaica announced on Monday that it planned to execute a convicted murderer on Thursday, the first hanging there in 11 years. Jamaica has 44 prisoners on death row.

Several other countries are moving to carry out death sentences and to tighten legislation to close any loopholes that might delay executions.

In recent years Caribbean nations have been plagued by violent crime, and capital punishment is over-whelmingly favored by the public as a way of fighting back.

"I think symbolically, it sends a strong message to the criminals and the would-be criminals," said Ronald Marshall, a sociology lecturer at the University of the West Indies, "and I think the message is one in which the countries may need to put them- selves in a concerted effort to stamp out crime."

Carl Joseph, Attorney General of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a small island group of 112,000 people in the eastern Caribbean, said, "We need to keep that ultimate penalty on our statute books so that the would be murderers would think twice about losing his own life."

After a 1993 ruling by the British Privy Council, the final court of appeal for former and current British territories in the Caribbean, the death sentences of several inmates in St. Vincent and Barbados were commuted to life in prison. The Privy Council held that it was inhumane to execute a prisoner after five

years on death row.

But Barbados, an independent member of the British Common-wealth, plans to amend its Constitution to override the effect of the 1993 ruling, allowing executions without unnecessary obstructions, the Barbados Attorney General, David Simmons, said this week.

According to one poll, about 88 percent of Barbados's 265,000 people support the death penalty for murder. "This has always been Barbados's position," Mr. Simmons said, "that if we had a large enough majority, we would amend the Constitution to overrule the effects" of the Privy Council ruling. The amendment will say that delays in carrying out an execution do .not amount to cruel and inhumane punishment.

In St. Lucia, another independent Commonwealth member, with a population of 148,000, Prime Minister Kenny Anthony said his Government plans to resume hanging prisoners who have exhausted their appeals. There are currently seven prisoners on death row.

"As far as the Government of St. Lucia is concerned, it will implement the laws of the land, which require that persons convicted of murder be hanged," he said. "We will resume hanging at the appropriate time."

In Jamaica, lawyers for Joseph Thomas, the murderer who is to be hanged on Thursday, are hurrying to file an appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in a last-ditch attempt to stay his execution. Mr. Thomas killed two men in 1993.