The Penalty Is Death by Barry Jones

Author:Barry Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC067000, PHI005000, LAW052000, LAW026020, LAW060000, SOC030000, SOC004000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

Views on the alternative to capital punishment and the commutation of sentences

Sir John Vincent Barry, QC

Sir John Vincent Barry (1903–1969), a leading Australian jurist, was a Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria 1947–69. He chaired the Criminology Department of the University of Melbourne 1951–69 and the Parole Board of Victoria 1957–69. In 1955 and 1960 he led Australian delegations to United Nations congresses on crime prevention and the treatment of offenders. As a barrister he had been active in the ALP, and was a federal candidate in 1943. He was awarded an LLD for Alexander Maconochie of Norfolk Island (1958), a study of an important penal reformer. His The Courts and Criminal Punishments (1969) was published posthumously.*

[* Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 13, 1993 by Bernard Teague.]

In 1966 he answered questions posed by the United Nations Bureau of Social Affairs, and his reply to one of them appears below.

* * *

On the basis of your professional experience and of informed opinion in your country, what ‘alternative sanctions’ should be applied?

A judicial sentence of imprisonment for life. The case should be examined at the expiration of seven years by an expert and independent Board, unless the responsible Minister requests the tribunal to examine it earlier. Unless there were exceptional circumstances, the first review at the expiration of seven years would not result in a recommendation for release. The function of the Board should be to report and recommend to the Executive Government, and the decision to act upon or reject the recommendation should remain with the government.

In Victoria, the Parole Board consisting (where males are involved) of a Supreme Court Judge, the Director-General of Social Welfare (of whose department the penal system is a division), and three men, who are at present a former chief stipendiary magistrate, a former chairman of the lndeterminate Sentences Board, now replaced by the Parole Board, and the president of the Prisoners’ Aid Society, and (where females are involved) of the Supreme Court Judge and the Director-General and three women experienced in social problems, has the obligation of making a written report and recommendation each year to the responsible Minister with respect to all prisoners who were convicted of murder committed while under eighteen. If the Minister requests the Parole Board to do so, it must make a written report and recommendation to him with respect to any person who was sentenced to death but whose sentence was commuted to imprisonment. If the Minister accepts a recommendation for release, he must bring it before Cabinet in order to obtain a decision for release That can be made effective by resolution of the Executive Council, which is the constitutional body which gives legal effect to Cabinet decisions. The recommendation invariably requires the person released to be subject to parole supervision for a period of five or seven years, and to observe appropriate conditions of parole.

If a sentence of death upon a prisoner over eighteen years of age is commuted to imprisonment by Executive decision, the Executive

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