The Enduring Colonial Death Penalty

This chapter examines how the death penalty operated in practice in Belize, Bermuda and Britain’s Caribbean Dependent Territories from the mid 1960s to early 1977. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was increasingly diligent in reviewing death sentences during this period and, despite executions in the British Virgin Islands in 1972 and Belize in 1974, British officials mostly pressured governors to commute, even though Britain remained formally committed to the Creech Jones doctrine. Britain’s approach to capital sentences was, moreover, increasingly influenced by diplomatic concerns by the mid 1970s, including, for the first Bermuda, time, international human rights treaty commitments that, exceptionally, prompted British intervention in a capital case in the West Indies Associated State of Dominica. In the Dependent Territories themselves, the execution and reprieve of condemned prisoners prompted protests related to constitutional reforms, local political conflicts and concerns about crime and national identity.