TRINIDAD HANGS DRUG-GANG MEMBERS

Island nation intends to send message with 9 executions

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad -- As the sun rose Friday behind the Northern Ridge
near here, and the 6 a.m. bell pealed at nearby St. Mary's College, the trap
door snapped open beneath Dole Chadee's feet in the State Prison gallows
room. Trinidad's most notorious murderer, drug lord and gang leader had been
hanged.

Joey Ramiah was the next to die. And then, at 8:44 a.m., it was Ramkalawan
Singh's turn.

Three more will hang today, and another three Monday, until all nine members
of the gang that slaughtered the Baboolal family over an apparent drug
dispute five years ago are dead.

Marking the moment with prayer and protest, the church bell at the capital's
Roman Catholic Cathedral tolled nine times at 8 a.m. -- a reminder,
Archbishop Anthony Pantin said, that "enough blood has been spilled."

But with hourly news bulletins, street-corner banter and banner headlines
announcing "Hanging Time," many in this crime-weary nation of 1.3 million
heaved a sigh of relief that what they consider justice had been done.

"Everybody will think before they kill now," concluded Marjorie Clark, a
50-year-old hospital worker in the somber crowd that gathered at dawn
outside the 187-year-old stone prison.

In staging these hangings -- with a single exception, Trinidad and Tobago's
first executions in two decades -- this twin-island nation means to send a
message to drug traffickers and contract killers who are littering the
Caribbean with cocaine and corpses.

It also is leading the way for neighboring island states seeking to brush
aside legal challenges and lengthy appeals and implement the death penalty.
The Trinidad hangings set the stage for executions expected in the months
ahead in Barbados, the Bahamas, Jamaica and other Caribbean nations.

But for Trinidad on Friday, hanging day was rife with irony: It was a major
victory for Attorney General Ramesh Maharaj, a onetime attorney for death
row inmates and a human rights crusader who partially withdrew from
international rights bodies while pushing hard for the hangings. His own
brother is on death row in Florida.

After years of frustrating judicial delays, Friday's hangings, Maharaj said,
prove that "punishment is a deterrent to crime."

The judicial body that cleared away the last roadblock to the gallows early
Friday was London's Privy Council, the highest appeal court for most of the
Caribbean's former British colonies. The council in the past has been the
biggest obstacle to imposing capital punishment in the region.

The council -- based in a nation that has banned the death penalty at home
and that has lobbied its former colonies to follow suit -- blocked dozens of
executions in the region by issuing a ruling in 1993 that limited the amount
of time convicted killers should have to spend on death row.

But in turning down a final desperate appeal just three hours before
Chadee -- hooded and robed, with hands bound -- stepped up to the gallows,
the Privy Council finally ceded Trinidad's constitutional right to enforce a
law that states: "Every person convicted of murder shall suffer death."