Edward Fitzgerald KC and Graeme Hall succeed in death penalty appeal
The Privy Council has allowed an appeal in the case of Mr Uriah Woods who was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. The Privy Council has remitted the matter to the Court of Appeal in Trinidad and Tobago exhorting it to establish a process for the routine mental health assessment of defendants.
The judgment can be found here.
Diminished responsibility
Mr Woods applied to rely on the fresh psychiatric evidence of Dr Latham and Dr Attard (both working pro bono) and psychological evidence of Ms LeeWah-Cooper to the effect that at the time of the offending he suffered with a delusional disorder along with a mild to moderate learning disability (an IQ in the bottom 0.1% of the population). The Board ruled that the evidence could not with due diligence have been available at trial, and otherwise remitted the matter to the Court of Appeal for it to determine whether the fresh evidence is admissible and whether it makes out the defence of diminished responsibility.
In so doing, the Board was especially critical of the failure of the State to assess Mr Woods’ mental health:
“the appellant was an indigent prisoner of “retarded” intellectual ability (as his psychological assessment opines) and who found himself in a penal system which appears to have offered no assistance for the recognition and evaluation of any state of delusional derangement he might in fact have been in, the state of mind that the experts have also now opined to have been operative at the time of his offence”
The Board concluded the judgment by inviting “the Court of Appeal to provide what are now long overdue guidelines for the routine assessment of the state of mind of defendants in cases which might appear to require such assessment in the future.”
Important clarification on the law on provocation
The Board provided important clarification on the law of provocation. In particular, once the jury has found that the defendant might have been provoked, the Board concluded that in the assessment of whether “the provocation was enough to make a reasonable man do as he did”:
- The term “do as he did” does not mean simply that the reasonable man might have formed an intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. While the Board found this to be “in terms of legal logic … an attractive submission”, it concluded that “the proportionality of the mode of killing to the provocation is a relevant factor which the jury may take into account when considering” whether the reasonable man might have done as the defendant did. The Board acknowledged that its decision disagreed (to varying degrees) with caselaw from the apex courts in Hong Kong , Australia and New Zealand.
- Nonetheless, the Board underlined that “there is no rule that the response must be proportionate to the provocation”. Rather, the proportionality of the response “is simply one factor which the jury may take into account”. The Board therefore concluded that the trial judge erred in directing the jury to decide whether the reasonable man would have been provoked “to do exactly as Mr Woods did” (Mr Woods chopped the deceased 22 times with a cutlass). The Board concluded that its previous decision in Phillips v The Queen [1969] 2 AC 130 to like effect was “unduly strict”.
Despite the trial judge’s error, the Board applied the proviso concluding that the killing was premediated.
Edward Fitzgerald KC and Graeme Hall appeared pro bono instructed by Saul Lehrfreund, Killian Moran and Bethany Turpin of The Death Penalty Project.
