Gallows undergoing extensive repairs

While counsel for Patrick Lovelace are working feverishly to save him from the hangman’s noose, the gallows at Fort Charlotte is being repaired.{{more}}

For the last three weeks or so, the gallows, which was last used for hanging in 1995, has been undergoing extensive repairs, seemingly for Lovelace, who is the only person presently on death row in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Lovelace, who was found guilty in 2009 of the 2002 rape and murder of 12-year-old Lokeisha Nanton, was sentenced to death by the High Court in February 2010.

Lovelace is basically set to be hanged, because having lost his appeal against his conviction, his sentence stood.

However, lawyer Kay Bacchus-Browne has recently signalled her intention to appeal Lovelace’s sentence at the Privy Council.

Two other inmates, who had been on death row, have had their sentences commuted to life in prison.

Daniel “Compay” Trimmingham, who had been sentenced to death for the brutal beheading and disembowelling of farmer Albert “Bertie” Browne in 2003, had his sentence commuted by the Privy Council in 2009. The Law Lords, in their judgement, found that Trimmingham’s crime was not the “worst of the worst, such as to call for the ultimate penalty of capital punishment.”

On May 31 this year, convicted murderer Shaun Samuel was determined by psychiatrists to have been suffering from a mental disorder when he beheaded Stacey Wilson in 2006. His death sentence was commuted by the OECS Court of Appeal.

Douglas Hamlett, Franklin Thomas and David Thomas were the last persons to face the hangman’s noose, back on February 13, 1995. They were all convicted of murder.