High Court of Trinidad and Tobago criticises the State for “spitting in the face of the courts” over refusal to carry out fair death penalty resentencing

In 1993, approximately 60 people on death row in Trinidad and Tobago had their death sentences commuted to natural life imprisonment, or a period of 75 years. These mass commutations were prompted by the landmark ruling in Pratt & Morgan in which the courts limited the time a person can be kept under a sentence of death in the Caribbean. The judgment recognised that a delay of more than five years in carrying out a death sentence constituted cruel and inhuman punishment.

Although the threat of execution was lifted for these individuals in Trinidad and Tobago, they were instead indiscriminately handed down natural life sentences, without any regard for mitigating factors or their potential for rehabilitation. They were denied the opportunity to make representations regarding their new sentences. Once the State was told it couldn’t execute, it had a legal duty to determine an appropriate sentence for each defendant individually and to review these sentences every four years – ensuring the person was informed and allowed to participate in the process.

For almost 30 years, they have petitioned to have their sentences reviewed, and to make representations at any and all reviews, but they have been routinely ignored.

“Trinidad has created a living monster out of the Pratt & Morgan judgment,” stated one defendant, Deolal Sukhram. He described living under the undefined natural life sentences as “slow death sentences,” and was routinely kept unaware of any decisions made regarding his sentencing as it was “made clear” that this was a normal practice.

In 2014, the Court of Appeal ruled that the failure to give the individuals notice of the date and time on which their sentences would be reviewed, copies of documents used in the process and the opportunity to make representations rendered the sentences unlawful. The State promised to re-sentence them through a fair process – a promise which was repeated at the Privy Council in 2017.

The State did nothing of the sort, and the individuals continued to serve undefined sentences with no clear end. The Executive was repeatedly urged to act by all levels of the justice system – including through these binding judicial pronouncements – but also by the defendants themselves, who pleaded for decades through extensive correspondence. In last-resort efforts in 2024 and earlier this year, The Death Penalty Project sent two separate letters to the Attorney General, expressing our grave concern over the extent to which these individuals and their basic rights had been continually disregarded.

On 23 June 2025, the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago delivered a judgment in the case of Xavier & Philip v The AG of Trinidad and Tobago which finally took the issue out of the State’s hands entirely. The Court ruled that the Claimants, Evans Xavier and Irvin Phillip, had suffered a serious breach of their constitutional rights and should now be resentenced by a judge, rather than leaving the matter with the Executive. The Court criticised the State for “spitting in the face of the courts” by ignoring orders to sentence the men properly, stating that: “sustained and unapologetic disregard for binding court orders, especially from the highest court of the land, tears at the fabric of constitutional democracy and strikes at the heart of the rule of law.”

Saul Lehrfreund, Co-Executive Director, The Death Penalty Project, said:

In this ruling, after three decades of failure, the Executive has finally been held accountable. The High Court, in its unusually damning criticism of the State, has made clear that the cruel and arbitrary deprivation of the rights of these Claimants has been about politics, not the rule of law. This entire issue has highlighted the dangers of an ideological weddedness to the mandatory death penalty, in which politics obstructs constitutional rights and an effective criminal justice process. Whether through the compulsory imposition of death sentences or through a lack of fair review of their blanket commutation, the outcome has been the same: a politically driven refusal to assess individual circumstances fairly. This kind of political theatre and gross injustice will continue unless the mandatory death penalty is abolished.

The State of Trinidad and Tobago has itself conceded that the mandatory death penalty is cruel and inhuman punishment yet has failed to move away from this outdated and unconstitutional practice. Trinidad is the only remaining country withing the Commonwealth Caribbean that still retains the mandatory death penalty. Judicial discretion has been introduced in all other Caribbean jurisdictions which allows the judge to consider the circumstances of the offence and the individual before imposing sentence with the death penalty the maximum rather than the only available sentence.