The Case of the Death Row Widow

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad — It was eight years ago, after nearly a decade of severe beatings, rapes and mental torture, that Indravani Pamela Ramjattan finally decided she had nothing left to lose.

Her husband, Alexander Jordan, a close friend of the local police in their rural Trinidadian town of Cumuto, had tracked her down at a friend’s house in a nearby village, she later testified. She had been hiding from him with two of their six children for more than a week.

“He kicked down the door and began smashing up the property,” Ramjattan recalled in an affidavit last year. “He said that he had ‘come to shed blood.’

“When we arrived back home, Jordan locked me in the bedroom. He threatened to blow my head away with his shotgun. He took the piece of wood he had brought in the van and told me he was going to sink my head into my neck with it.”

And he nearly did.

The 4-foot-11, 102-pound Ramjattan was beaten unconscious by her much larger 47-year-old husband, she and her eldest daughter later testified in their sworn statements. And an hour later, when the 28-year-old Ramjattan came to, they said, Jordan had lined up all six children in their unfinished shack and asked each child, one by one, if he should kill their mother.

That was Feb. 4, 1991. A week later, Jordan was beaten to death by two men whom Ramjattan had called to rescue her--one her lover. Ramjattan swears she never asked them to kill Jordan, and prosecutors concede that she never raised a hand against a man they acknowledge had abused her for years.

Still, Ramjattan was convicted of murder, and the Trinidadian government says it is her turn to die.

Now sentenced to hang after a succession of judges also acknowledged her years of abuse but refused to accept them as justification for murder, Ramjattan has filed an appeal that is scheduled to be heard Tuesday by the Privy Council in London, which remains the supreme court for Trinidad and other Caribbean nations that are former British colonies.

The case could set a precedent for these island nations where, women’s rights advocates say, wife-killers routinely get minimal prison terms while wives who retaliate against abusers often are prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law.

A Cause Celebre for Women’s Groups

Ramjattan vs. the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is the first such case to reach the highest court for the region, and it has become a cause celebre in recent months for women’s solidarity groups here and abroad that say they are trying to balance the scales of justice.

The case also has become powerful ammunition in the hands of abolitionists fighting the death penalty in Trinidad and several other Caribbean nations.

But mostly, this slight woman on death row, who left school at 13 and mothered her children while enduring nine years of physical and mental torment, has become a prototype for social workers and rights groups battling domestic violence in more than a dozen nations of the English-speaking Caribbean.

Women’s rights activists say studies done so far on domestic violence in the Caribbean offer no clear picture of the extent of the problem, but they believe it is widespread.

“If you take a rough rate of 1 in 10 cases being reported, I estimate there is an incident of domestic violence taking place in Trinidad every 20 minutes,” said Diana Mahabir-Wyatt, a Trinidadian senator who has led the fight against domestic violence here.

“That may not seem to be very high in comparison to the United States or other countries outside the region,” said Mahabir-Wyatt, who founded the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition Against Domestic Violence in the late 1980s. “But in small societies like ours, it is very high, because there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

Official statistics show that, on average, about 20 women and children are killed by domestic violence each year in this twin-island nation of about 1.2 million people.

Trinidad is hardly unique in the region. Cathy Shepherd, who heads the 14-nation Caribbean Assn. for Feminist Research and Action, cited other studies:

* Police in Jamaica attributed 39% of their murders in 1995 to domestic disputes. The overwhelming majority of the victims were women.

* Out of 97 women ages 20 to 45 surveyed in Antigua, 30% said they had been battered as adults.

* The same percentage of 264 women surveyed in the same age group in Barbados said they had suffered domestic abuse as adults.

But such figures fail to show the extent of the problem, women’s activists here say, because most abuse in the region is not reported.

“It’s a cultural thing,” said attorney Roberta Clarke, one of the Trinidadian attorneys representing Ramjattan in her appeal. “How do you charge the man who is the father of your children? If he goes to jail, he doesn’t work. If he doesn’t work, he can’t support the children.”

A Society Where Education Is Strong

Clarke and other women’s rights advocates say it may seem ironic that Ramjattan’s case arose in Trinidad; the oil- and gas-rich nation has a strong economy and a quality educational system that should foster a higher awareness of such social issues.

Parliament, in fact, passed the region’s first law against domestic violence, in 1991. A pioneering Community Police Unit created three years ago to specialize in domestic-abuse cases has won high praise from women’s groups and victims of such violence. And private organizations have opened half a dozen shelters for abused women during the past decade.

But activists assert that little has been done to institutionalize the progressive 1991 law and change traditional attitudes.

“We have found that many of the women coming to our shelters still don’t know they have a right to live a violence-free life,” Mahabir-Wyatt said. “Wife-beating is not treated seriously by the police, and it is not treated seriously by the courts.”

Clarke and other attorneys point to volumes of testimony not only in the Ramjattan case but in several other recent domestic violence cases that they say show a judicial double standard, although they have yet to conduct a systematic analysis to document the claim.

Using anecdotal evidence, though, Mahabir-Wyatt’s coalition seized on the issue last year after the courts sentenced former Trinidadian police officer Don Renaud to 10 years in prison for killing his fiancee, Allison Majardsingh. That came soon after another islander, Christopher Sirju, received a five-year sentence for killing his wife, Indra, and an additional six years for attempting to drown their two children. And after Winston Joseph received a five-year prison term for fatally strangling his wife, Pansy Wiltshire, who was six months pregnant when she died.

In each of those cases, the men were convicted on a lesser charge of manslaughter.

“It would appear that while the murder of a man by his wife is a murder to be regarded seriously, the murder of a woman and an unborn child by her husband is only a killing and therefore is not such a serious issue,” the coalition said in a news release after Renaud’s sentencing. “Longer sentences are given for possession of cocaine. And this is not unique to Trinidad and Tobago.”

Ramesh Maharaj, the nation’s attorney general, rejected the charge.

“If that is the case, then it is an accusation that should be made in a court of law,” he said.

Of the Ramjattan case, he said: “The fact is, Pamela Ramjattan got a trial before a judge and jury. She had every opportunity to present her case. And the conviction was upheld by the [Trinidadian] Court of Appeal. You have a situation where you had 12 jurors, three judges in the Court of Appeal and three judges in the United Kingdom who said there was no travesty of justice.”

In fact, Ramjattan’s lawyers chose not to present evidence of her years of abuse at her 1995 trial. Rather, it was the prosecution that used the abuse to reinforce the argument that Ramjattan had a strong motive to murder her husband.

Her lawyers also chose not to focus on the abuse in her first appeal to the Privy Council, which declined to hear the case two years ago despite acknowledging that she had suffered years of abuse that the panel called “a reign of terror.”

Local lawyers said Ramjattan’s defense was complicated by the fact that, at the time of her husband’s death, she was pregnant with the child of her lover, who was charged and convicted, along with a friend, of beating Jordan to death in his sleep. Both are appealing their death sentences. Ramjattan conceded that she summoned and opened the door for her husband’s killers that night.

Extent of Brutality Slow to Surface

It was only last year, Mahabir-Wyatt and several local attorneys say, that they learned through interviews with Ramjattan on death row about the extent of the brutality. They hired a British lawyer and filed the appeal now pending before the Privy Council, a rare request for a rehearing by the high court that could set a precedent for the islands: that domestic abuse can justify homicide in self-defense.

Specifically, the appeal asks the council to reconsider the case based on new evidence: a 17-page psychiatric report on Ramjattan by a London-based expert on domestic abuse. Forensic psychiatrist Nigel Eastman of London’s St. George’s Hospital Medical School concluded that Ramjattan was a classic victim of “battered woman syndrome.”

Eastman’s report states that Ramjattan suffered “repetitive physical violence, culminating in a most severe attack on 4th February, repeated rapes . . . enforced isolation . . . amounting ultimately [to] imprisonment as a hostage in the days leading up to the offense, threats to kill, attacks with weapons, threats with a shotgun, worsened violence if she protested, worsened violence when she escaped, humiliation and mental abuse [starving and beating their children and refusing to allow them to go to school].”

Those finds are bolstered by several new affidavits from Ramjattan; her eldest daughter, Candice; and even Jordan’s first wife, Moonie Joseph, who alleges in her statement that Jordan abused her for 17 years before leaving her for Ramjattan.

The affidavits, filed last year in a separate, pending appeal to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, paint a picture that local social workers say is all too common, in some ways, in rural areas of the Caribbean. They assert that Ramjattan was, in effect, sold to Jordan by her parents when she was 17 and forced to live in a remote area where traditional gender values reign supreme.

Ramjattan stated that, after Jordan alternately threatened her parents and offered them cash, they sent her to live with him in a two-bedroom concrete structure without electricity or phone service. Two years later, she said, the abuse began: Jordan repeatedly beat, raped and threatened her with a shotgun for the next nine years.

Candice, who was 10 at the time of the murder, added in her affidavit last year that Jordan also beat her and her siblings. She stressed the family’s feeling of helplessness:

“My father was good friends with the local police. He went shooting for wild animals with them near our house, on average once or twice a month. . . . They would come back to our house before or after going shooting, and there they would see my mother’s injuries. She so often had black eyes, bruises and swelling over her face. . . . The police would never have done anything to protect my mother.

“I know that what my mother wanted was an end to all the beatings and abuse,” Candice added. “She did not want my father dead. She just wanted him to stop beating her and us.”

Maharaj, the attorney general, said he believes that attitudes of law enforcement toward domestic violence are changing because of gender-sensitivity classes being taken by police, prosecutors and judges. But he conceded that the drama of Ramjattan’s case--and the dilemma it presents his government--has brought increased attention to the death penalty issue in Trinidad.

But rights activists say Ramjattan’s case never should have gotten this far.

“The fact is,” concluded Mahabir-Wyatt, “attitudes in our judicial systems throughout this region--and the world--must change much faster, or we’re going to have a lot more Pamela Ramjattans.”