ONLOOKERS of last week's crime conference, at which Dr Ralph Gonsalves made a startling call for the resumption of hanging, might have come away feeling the St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister has had a clear-cut, unequivocal history of supporting the death penalty.

He boasted while he was a Roman Catholic and the Pope and his mother were against hanging, he was of a different persuasion.

'I happen to think that both my mother and the Pope were wrong,' Dr Gonsalves said, prompting chuckles from the audience of Caricom leaders and specially invited guests gathered at the Hyatt Regency Trinidad.

'For murder, other than a crime of passion, you should get the death penalty.'

But Gonsalves, 76, and his native country have a far more complex history with this issue than was apparent.

'I have oscillated between the death penalty and no death penalty for a long time,' he confessed in an interview broadcast on NBC Radio St Vincent and the Grenadines on April 12, mere days before his appearance at the Hyatt on April 17. It was only over the last dozen years or so, he said in that radio interview, that his opinions had settled.

Perhaps his earlier doubt had something to do with the fact that the last time the hangman prevailed in his country, an innocent man may have been executed, according to opponents of the death penalty.

Early on February 13, 1995, Douglas Hamlet was hanged for the murder of fisheries officer Fanny Daroux. Hamlet was convicted solely on the evidence of a 14-year-old identification witness who claimed to have seen him from 125 -184 metres away, in rain. An investigating officer also played a role in the ID parade, around which there were troubling questions.

On the same date, brothers Franklin and David Thomas were also executed. None was given more than a weekend's notice of his execution.

While on April 17, Gonsalves reported people in 'taverns' across the region - including this country and Barbados - are overwhelmingly in favour of the death penalty, this was largely not the case in his own country in the year 2009. In that year, 56 per cent of the St Vincent and the Grenadines population rejected, in a referendum, a proposal to change the country's constitution to pave the way to resume the death penalty.

Gonsalves, the defence attorney

The St Vincent PM also excoriated judges last week for being too beholden to the submissions of defence attorneys appearing before them. Some might note the irony of this, given his own legal career in St Vincent.

Before rising to become his country's premier, Gonsalves was a lawyer by training. He was famously a defence lawyer in the trial of American couple Jim and Penny Fletcher, who in 1997 were facing the hangman for the murder of a water-taxi operator, Jerome 'Jolly' Joseph. The sensational trial - which, interestingly, featured Trinidadian Karl Hudson-Phillips, QC, as the prosecutor - saw the couple acquitted.

The judge, Dubar Cenac, found: 'There is no evidence before me, direct or indirect, that the accused commit