40 92) Finally, the Commission indicated that the "mandatory death penalty" is incompatible with the safeguards of the most fundamental human rights. This finding is consistent with the conclusions reached by supervisory domestic and international bodies that have considered the matter, including the Inter-American Court and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, who recently addressed the issue in Reyes v. The Queen. The Commission stated that, according to this jurisprudence, the death penalty is subject to rigorous application of judicial guarantees and procedural requirements, whose observance should be strictly respected and scrutinized by the highest domestic judicial bodies. Contentions of the Representatives of the Alleged Victims 93) The representatives of the alleged victims indicated that the victims were convicted of murder and automatically sentenced to death by hanging, pursuant to the Offences Against the Person Act of 1925, without any examination of the particular circumstances of the crime or the background or personal characteristics of the accused. In this way, each one of the 32 victims was tried under a legal system that did not permit a charge of non-capital murder and did not permit judicial discretion to impose a lesser sentence. This implies a violation of Articles 4(1), 4(2), 5(1), 5(2) and 8(1), in relation to Article 1(1) of the American Convention. 94) The representatives considered that when a State maintains the death penalty, it should implement a classification system for murder with varying degrees of culpability, thus ensuring that this punishment is only imposed for the most serious crimes. 95) Likewise, they indicated that the classification or qualification of the crime alone is not sufficient for the determination of the penalty. It is also necessary to consider the particular circumstances of the crime, such as the prior criminal record and character of the offender, before imposing the most severe punishment, in order that the crime committed and the punishment be proportional. 96) In relation to the above, the representatives of the alleged victims added that, according to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 102 [y]et there is perhaps no single class of offences which varies so widely both in character and in culpability as the class comprising those that may fall within the comprehensive common law definition of murder […] we may see the multifarious variety of the crimes for which death is the uniform sentence. Convicted persons may be men, or they may be women, youths, girls, or hardly older than children. They may be normal or they may be feeble-minded, neurotic, epileptic, borderline cases, or insane; and in each case the mentally abnormal may be differently affected by their abnormality […]. 103 102 The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment was set up though the initiative of the British Parliament by command of the Queen of England between 1949 and 1950, for the purpose of considering whether the death penalty should be limited or modified as a punishment. 103 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, September 1953, Cmnd 8932 (United Kingdom), p. 6, para. 21.