Facts
Although capital punishment remains on the books, just 13 people have been executed in The Bahamas since the country attained independence on July 10, 1976.
In 2000, David Mitchell was the last person sentenced to death. Convicted of the 1994 stabbing deaths of Horst and Traude Jennings as they slept in their home in Abaco, Mitchell was hanged on January 6, 2000. Beautician John Higgs was scheduled to hang on the same day for the 1993 murder of his wife, Joan, the granddaughter of former Governor General Sir Milo Butler. However, two days before his scheduled execution, Higgs committed suicide in his cell by slitting his wrists.
Mandatory death sentenced abolished
On March 8, 2006, Privy Council, the country’s final court, declared the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional in the case of Forrester Bowe of Trono Davis. The highest appellate court said the ultimate punishment was reserved for the most extreme and exceptional cases.
The landmark decision resulted in new sentences for murder convicts, whose death sentences had been deemed unlawful by the court. Davis and Bowe were both re-sentenced to life imprisonment. However, some murder convicts were released as a result of the re-sentencing exercise.
One month after Privy Council outlawed the mandatory death penalty, a judge imposed the death penalty on Maxo Tido for the murder of 16-year-old Donnell Conover on April 30, 2002. She was found dead in a quarry pit off Cowpen Road, with her skull crushed. The Court of Appeal upheld his sentence in 2008, remarking that “the level of homicide has increased substantially” since the 2006 Privy Council decision.
Nonetheless, on June 15, 2011 the Privy Council overturned the sentence after ruling that Donnell’s “appalling” murder could not be considered “the worst of the worst” or the “rarest of the rare.”
In 2012, Tido was resentenced to 60 years in prison, which was reduced to 52 years after taking into account the eight years he had already spent in prison.
Tido appealed against the sentence, and on February 25, 2015 the Court of Appeal substituted a sentence of 40 years’ imprisonment.
Death eligible
In 2011, Parliament defined capital offences: the murder of law enforcement; murder of a juror or judicial officer; contract killings; murders in the course of an armed robbery, murder of kidnapping and if the convict had a previous murder conviction. Despite this, the Bahamian courts have not upheld any death sentences in any of these scenarios.
Parliament also set a sentencing range 0f 30 to 60 years for non-capital offences.
