"Throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean, various legal challenges have been brought to the imposition of the death penalty, the most recent series of which deals with the mandatory nature of the penalty's imposition for crimes of murder (or in some states, certain categories of murder). Efforts undertaken since the mid-1990s to challenge the legality of a mandatory death sentence finally paid off in 2002, when the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Privy Council), acting as the highest appellate court for all but one of the Commonwealth Caribbean states, held in a series of three cases that such a sentence was contrary to the prohibition on inhuman punishment and therefore unconstitutional." (author)
Examines the colonial experiences of eight formerly British-controlled territories- Barbados, Jamaica, Botswana, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Burma, and Singapore -to identify how the processes and policies of the colonial enterprise affected their respective contemporary rule of law outcomes.
