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4. If the Governor in a dependent territory is to be supplanted, responsibility should be placed in the hands of a single Minister, as it is in principle wrong that the final responsibility in capital cases should be diffused. To place final responsibility in a collectivity such as an Advisory Committee is to risk that responsibility being exercised with insufficient care, since no one member of the collectivity is individually responsible for the decision eventually reached.
5. The Governor's rôle could be made purely formal only if he were advised by a single Minister on whose advice he was obliged to act in other words, if his position were assimilated to that of a Governor-General. But this solution would be appropriate only in a dependent territory with a very advanced constitution and could not be resorted to in territories where Ministers do not exist or where the advice of Ministers can be disregarded by
the Governor in the exercise of reserved powers.
6.
Furthermore, if a single Minister were to be given the final responsibility in a territory at an advanced stage of self- government, it would be very awkward for the Secretary of State to attempt to reverse the decision. If the Secretary of State advised the Crown to commute a capital sentence upheld by the Minister, this would almost certainly involve him in a direct clash with the local government, even though, technically speaking, the local Cabinet had no collective responsibility for the single
Minister's decision.
7. At present the Governor operates as a buffer between the local government and the Secretary of State. He can often influence the Executive Council or Advisory Committee in favour of commutation and can ignore their advice if it is ill-founded. At the moment in the British Virgin Islands there is a case where the Judge considers the jury to have been biased against an outsider convicted of murder. The Judge feels that the circumstances warrant a reprieve but it is not thought likely that the Mercy Committee
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