St Kitts executes wife killer

The Order for the Hanging posted on the door of Her Majesty's Prison in Basseterre, St Kitts where Charles Elroy Laplace had been behind bars, awaiting execution for the 2006 murder of his wife.

BASSETERRE, St Kitts, December 19, 2008 – Amidst calls from British courts and human rights groups for countries in the region to ban capital punishment, one Caribbean country carried out its first hanging in 10 years this morning while the court in another island sentenced a man to death.

Charles Elroy Laplace, one of nine persons on death row at the prison in Basseterre, was executed around 8 am for the brutal February 2006 murder of his wife.

The country’s Attorney General Dennis Merchant is expected to make a statement today on the matter as the 2009 budget debate continues. The last hanging took place in 1998 when 28-year-old David Wilson was executed for beating a hotel security guard to death four years earlier.

Over in St Vincent, a man who beheaded a 21-year-old woman two years ago has been sentenced to death.

Shorn Samuel, 35, who hacked Stacy Wilson to death at a bus terminal in the capital on December 11, 2006 as others watched, had to be restrained by police officers as Justice Frederick Bruce Lyle pronounced the sentence yesterday afternoon.

The judge described Samuel’s attack, which ended in him cutting off the woman’s head and throwing it aside, as “a premeditated, barbaric and inhumane act”.

He had been convicted for the crime in October this year, but the judge handed down the sentence after a psychiatric evaluation was delivered to the court and closing arguments were made by both the defence and prosecution.