R v Hughes

For the Canadian "right to food" trial, see R v Hughes (Canada).

R v Hughes, Reyes v R and Fox v R were a trilogy of closely related cases considered by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC), with the appeals heard together and the decisions released simultaneously on the 11 March 2002.^[1][2] The cases dealt with the constitutionality of the capital punishment in the Commonwealth Caribbean countries of Saint Lucia, Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis respectively.^[1]

Arms of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

Reyes concerned a man who, during a conflict over a fence, shot his neighbour and the neighbour's wife, then unsuccessfully attempted suicide.^[2] Fox involved British bodybuilder Bertil Fox, who in 1998 was convicted of the double murder of his former fiancée and her mother the previous year.^[3]

In all three cases it was held that mandatory death penalty was contrary to prohibitions on inhuman punishment, and thus unconstitutional.^[4]

However, this conclusion doesn't necessarily apply in all of the Caribbean Commonwealth as the 2004 cases JCPC of Boyce v R (Barbados) and Matthew v The State (Trinidad and Tobago) found for the constitutionality of the death penalty in those countries.^[5]