Nobody on death row, says prison chief

Barbadian prison authorities say no murder convicts have been on death row at HMP Dodds since the St Philip facility opened on October 15, 2007.

Superintendent of Prisons Lieutenant Colonel John Nurse sought to make that clear on Thursday, in response to questions from Barbados TODAY, after High Court Judge Jacqueline Cornelius asked the State to investigate claims that six convicted murderers who are to be resentenced remain on death row at Dodds.

The issue came up during the resentencing hearing of former condemned prisoner Clyde Anderson Grazettes on Tuesday, when his attorneys, Queen’s Counsel Andrew Pilgrim and Sian Lange informed the judge that their client was still on death row, along with five other men, despite a Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) ruling that the mandatory death sentence is unconstitutional.

But Nurse, in seeking to clear the air, explained that the only place one might consider “death row” is when the convict is moved to “another place” after the death warrant is read and the convict is informed of the date of execution.

“Once you get sentenced to death, you are not automatically on death row. You are sentenced to death, that’s what your status is. People in here still loosely use the term and it is not just people outside who are doing it. You might have a man who is moving around and working and somebody is going to say he is a death row inmate. How? He doesn’t live there,” the prison boss said.

“So it is a term that has stuck, but it is not accurate. For me, as a professional, death row is that area next to and continuous to the place of execution…and nobody lives there. That is the point I am trying to make,” he added, stressing that a prisoner’s position moves only when the death warrant is read and that has never happened at Dodds and had not happened for a very long time at the previous prison, Glendairy.

No one has been executed in Barbados for almost 40 years. The last execution was on October 10, 1984 when Noel Jordan, Melvin Inniss, and Errol Farrell were hanged.

“When I say to you that we have not had any persons in that area, we have not had any persons in that area. Most certainly we would have been paying attention to the court rulings and so on, but paperwork is paperwork, your status is your status,” Nurse insisted.

“If you are on remand, you are on remand until something happens that comes in here and tells me that your status has changed from remand to sentence. You have to give direction, and if the direction is not given, we got to maintain the status quo up to a certain point,” the prison superintendent added in an apparent reference to Pilgrim’s request to have his convicted client relocated from “death row”.

In response to reports that all “death row” inmates had been relocated since the concerns were raised in the High Court on Tuesday, Lt Col Nurse told Barbados TODAY they were never in that area to begin with.

“We have not had to move anybody, so I don’t know who would come and say that,” he said, adding that, in any case, not all persons under sentence of death are in maximum security.

“We do have some who are in lower security because they have been here so long, and through their behaviour and so on, you deescalate them, but then there are others, who through their behaviour you have to keep in certain types of accommodation,” Nurse pointed out.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb