Navigating Retention in an Abolitionist Age: Barbados as a Counterintuitive Case Study

In 2018, the Caribbean Court of Justice struck down as unconstitutional Barbados’ mandatory death penalty law, branding it a relic of the colonial era, incompatible with ideas of human equality which underpinned the country’s independence in 1966. This interpretation of capital punishment in association with the imperial past, and of abolition with the post-independence era, corresponds with the dominant framing of the death penalty’s twentieth-century history. Yet, rather than seizing the moment to accomplish abolition outright, Barbados responded to the ruling by amending its law to enshrine instead a discretionary death penalty regime in which certain aggravated murders could be punished by death. The contours of the death penalty debate in Barbados provoke reconsideration of abolition and legacies of colonialism. How can historians of criminal justice, colonialism and independence explain this counter-intuitive course of events? This paper explores the recent history of death as punishment in Barbados, as an example of a postcolonial nation in which decolonisation discourses diverged from the dominant historiography on abolition. From the 1990s, the UK Privy Council, Barbados’s final court of appeal, had approached Commonwealth Caribbean death penalty cases informed by the emerging post-war human rights consensus which favoured abolition over retention. In response to perceived interference in a sovereign matter, Barbados withdrew from the Privy Council and adopted the Caribbean Court of Justice as its final appellate court. These manoeuvrings present a seeming paradox in which a punishment, the origins of which lay in the history of brutal colonisation, was fiercely defended centuries later, and decades post-independence, by Barbados and against the original imposer of the punishment. This British Academy-funded project draws on legal, political and media discourses to examine an alternative history of abolition, suggesting that the idiosyncratic ways in which these processes unfurl cannot be captured by a narrative of anti-colonial abolitionism.