Plans to reinstate the death penalty in Minnesota were hit with a potentially fatal blow yesterday when the senate rejected a bill to allow voters to decide.

Death penalty supporters, including the Senate sponsor, Mady Reiter, R-Shoreview, and Gov. Tim Pawlenty, said there is little chance of passage this year though a death penalty bill remains alive in the House. The measure was defeated 8-2 in the Senate Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee with all the Democrats and two of the four Republican members voting against it. The bill would place the issue before voters in November in the form of a constitutional amendment.

In other death penalty news, hundreds of Carribean death row inmates may get a reprieve:

Hundreds of death row prisoners in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica could win a reprieve if an unprecedented privy council hearing beginning in London today rules that the mandatory death penalty for murder is unconstitutional....
The appeal is the culmination of a strategy deployed over the last six years by English lawyers working free of charge on behalf of Caribbean death row inmates....If they succeed, up to 300 prisoners on death row in the three countries will have to have their sentences reviewed. The death penalty will not be abolished but will be limited to the most serious cases, and will no longer be the automatic penalty for murder.