THE 13 GRENADIAN REVOLUTIONARIES serving life sentences for the murder of former Prime Minister Maurice Bishop will have to be re-sentenced. Britain's Privy Council made the ruling yesterday. The 13 – party leader Bernard Coard, Callistus Bernard, Lester Redhead, Christopher Stroude, Hudson Austin, Liam James, Leon Cornwall, John Ventour, Dave Bartholomew, Ewart Layne, Colvin McBarnett, Selwyn Strachan and Cecil Prime – were sentenced to hang for the roles they played in the execution of Bishop who was killed during a coup on October 19, 1983. That sentence was handed down December 4, 1986, and commuted to life five years later, but the Privy Council ruled that the mandatory death sentence given to each in the first place was unconstitutional. Their lordships do not think that in practice the relief sought by the appellants in relation to their sentences was ever available through the ordinary avenue of appeal, the five Law Lords concluded. The council, made up of Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Lord Hoffman, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Carswell and Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, further declared the sentence of death imposed upon the 13 invalid, and ruled that the case should be remitted to the Supreme Court of Grenada for them to be sentenced in accordance with the construction of Section 230 of the Criminal Code, taking into account the progress made by the appellants during their time in prison. The lordships said their decision was based mainly on a number of submissions which indicated that Section 230 of Grenada's Criminal Code must be interpreted to mean, and has meant since its Constitution came into force in 1974, that the death penalty for murder was discretionary. "A person convicted may be sentenced to death, but may instead be given a lesser sentence," they ruled. The judge did not exercise this discretion [in the original murder trial in 1986], and the sentence was therefore unlawful. Known as the Grenada 13, the appellants had on September 23, 2002, challenged an August 15, 1991 decision to have their death sentences commuted to life and hard labour, claiming that action had no legal basis, and was unlawful since the Privy Council had on March 11, 2002, determined that the mandatory death penalty was an "inhuman or degrading punishment." Reprinted from nationews.com