Five long-serving prisoners were released from custody yesterday following ministerial approval, according to the Bartica United Youth Development Group (BUYDG), which welcomed the move while calling for the cases of other elderly and medically vulnerable inmates to be urgently reviewed.
Kiskadee Watch has independently confirmed with a source that the men were released yesterday.
In a statement, BUYDG’s Human Rights and Prison Reform Division said the list of prisoners was approved by the minister on Monday, after which their families were informed.
The organisation identified four of the five released men as Derrick Callender, Hafiz Hussein, Terrence Sahadeo and Colwyn Smart. The identity of the fifth prisoner had not been confirmed up to yesterday.
BUYDG described the releases as a “long-overdue development” and said it had for years called for the cases of prisoners serving lengthy sentences to be examined through the parole and mercy systems.
The organisation stressed that its advocacy was not intended to minimise serious crimes or abandon the interests of victims, butwas based on the view that justice should also take account of rehabilitation, proportionality, health, age and the length of time served.
Of the four men identified, Sahadeo had spent more than two decades on death row before his sentence was commuted.
Stabroek News reported in January 2013 that Sahadeo had been convicted on November 8, 1989 of the September 18, 1985 murder of 18-year-old Roshani Kassim.
He had been on death row for approximately 23 years when acting Chief Justice Ian Chang commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Sahadeo had reportedly applied to the Advisory Council on the Prerogative of Mercy twice between 1997 and 2009 but received no response.
An earlier Stabroek News report said Sahadeo, Muntaz Ally and Shireen Khan were convicted in connection with Kassim’s killing and that their appeals were dismissed by the Guyana Court of Appeal in 1996.
Hussein was also among a group of condemned prisoners whose death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 2012 after they had spent more than ten years on death row, according to Stabroek News.
Callender, whose surname has also appeared as “Callendar”, was identified in a 2014 Stabroek News report as a murder convict. That report concerned an altercation at the New Amsterdam Prison and did not provide details of the offence for which he had been imprisoned.
No detailed report on Smart’s original conviction could be located in Stabroek News’s searchable online archive.
BUYDG said yesterday’s releases demonstrated that action could be taken and urged the authorities not to overlook other prisoners who may qualify for parole, mercy or humanitarian relief. It named Oral Hendricks, Lawrence Chan, Ganga Deolall and Brian Vandeyar among the other long-serving prisoners whose cases it believes warrant individual review.
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