Sentenced to death without execution: Why capital punishment has not yet been abolished in the Eastern Caribbean and Barbados

By The death penalty project, on 4 May 2020

Extract from Death Penalty Project, publish on april 7.

Click here To read the full study.

This independent empirical study, which presents the views of 100 ‘opinion formers’, drawn from the seven jurisdictions, aims to shed light on why these countries hang on to capital punishment and what are the barriers to the complete abolition of the death penalty in these nations.


Key findings include:

• Across these seven nations, 48 of the interviewees favoured retention of the death penalty (18 of them strongly) and 52 were in favour of its abolition (30 of them strongly)
• Of those who favoured retention of the death penalty, only a minority were committed to retaining it: only 10 of 48 interviewees said they would ‘strongly oppose an Act of Parliament to completely abolish the death penalty by definitely voting against it.
• Respondents believed the best strategies to persuade their respective governments to embrace reform were: ‘through creating an influential civil society pressure group ‘Citizens Against the Death Penalty’; by ‘mounting a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty’; or by ‘persuading the government to establish a high-level commission to report on the subject’.