JAMAICA: Former US death row inmate against death penalty in Jamaica

Delbert Tibbs, a former United States death row inmate, yesterday urged the Jamaican authorities to drop plans for the reintroduction of capital punishment.

 He favours life sentences, not executions for killers. He said, however, that living out one's life in a jail cell is "worse than capital punishment in most instances."

 Tibbs, a resident of Chicago, Illinois, who spent three years on death row in Florida, visited Jamaica for the 1st time yesterday as a guest of local human rights groups who are stepping up their campaign against the death penalty.

 The one-time seminary student, released in 1977, said he had insisted on his innocence and prayed that God spare him from the electric chair. "It was divine intervention," he said, after doubts were thrown on his conviction for rape and murder.

 Tibbs is one of the first of scores of former death rows inmates whom courts in the United States have released in recent years, after DNA and other evidence cast doubt on their guilt.

 "For a long time, I was the only person in the USA who walked away from death row because I was innocent," said Tibbs.

 Prime Minister P J Patterson has pledged to reintroduce the gallows to fight rampaging killers.

 Last year, more than 1,000 people were murdered in Jamaica, giving the country one of the region's highest murder rates.

 "I am not a saint or an angel, but I value life and I believe that all life is sacred," said Tibbs, during a news conference at the Knutsford Court Hotel in Kingston.

 The Afro-American said he now makes his living on the lecture circuit, telling about his death row experiences on a God-given mission to end the death penalty. He said he's writing his autobiography and sells a book of self-published poetry.

 In the United States, Tibbs claimed, racism has played a role in putting a disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics on death row. Executions, he insisted, amount to state-sanctioned murder and "revenge" that only create more victims and pain.

 Dennis Daly, a lawyer and vice president of he Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights, said the death penalty in the United States has come under increasing criticism in recent year. Outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan, he noted, recently commuted the death sentences of all 164 death row prisoners. Ryan had expressed doubts about the infallibility of the state's criminal-justice system -- after 17 death rows prisoners were proven to be innocent and released.

 "The political courage of Gov George Ryan stands out in marked contrast to the spinelessness of several leading Jamaican politicians, who claim to oppose capital punishment in principle, but who lack the courage of their convictions to enable them to resist the resumption of the death penalty," Daly said. He did not mention any of the "politicians" by name.

 Daly and fellow activist Maria Carla Gullotta, co-ordinator of Amnesty International Jamaica, repeated anti-death penalty arguments: that the death penalty does not reduce crime; is morally equivalent to murder; and risks the possibility of putting to death innocent people.

 Gullotta claimed that Jamaica's crime rate has "not changed one bit" for having sentenced 50 convicted killers to the gallows over the years. She did not, however, cite any evidence to support this assertion.

 Daly, elaborating on why death penalty does not deter violent criminals, added: "If executions were a deterrent to criminal activity, including murder, the extra-legal executions carried out routinely by the specialist execution squads would be a far more effective deterrent than would be a handful of formal executions by the state."

 Daly was apparently referring to alleged "shoot-out" between police and criminals, which frequently prompt charges that police were trigger- happy. Jamaica's police face one of the Caribbean's highest crime rates, have been victims of targeted killings, and are often outgunned by well-armed criminals said to have ties to the lucrative drug trade.