A House of Assembly debate on the double jeopardy rule is expected to take place within weeks, The Royal Gazette has learned.

Shadow Legislative Affairs Minister John Barritt is spearheading the motion that Bermuda should change the law to allow retrials of people acquitted of serious crimes if new evidence comes to light.

"Essentially what we are asking parliament to do is to agree that the law ought to be reformed," he said.

The motion has been on the agenda for months. At the end of the last sitting of parliament, Mr. Barritt renewed the motion for another three months and tabled an executive summary of Britain's Law Commission's recommendations that the legal reform be made in that country.

Yesterday he told The Royal Gazette that the Opposition United Bermuda Party (UBP) should be meeting in caucus this week to decide when the motion should be debated.

"My feeling is it will be either this week or the next," Mr. Barritt said.

And PLP whip Ottiwell Simmons said that he was aware that Mr. Barritt was anxious to have the matter debated soon.

"Obviously we'll do our best to accommodate the situation," he said.

Double jeopardy is a long held principle of British juris prudence. But following a report into the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence and a Law Commission report, the British Labour Party Government's agenda on crime in its current term of office now includes ending the rule.

As in Britain, ending double jeopardy in Bermuda would require legislative action locally. And while there were calls for it in the wake of the collapsed Rebecca Middleton murder trial, there were few ardent supporters. The trial ended without anyone being convicted for the murder of Canadian teenager Ms Middleton, after a ruling by trial judge Vincent Meerabux that murder accused Justis Smith had no case to answer.

Former co-defendant Kirk Mundy was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of being an accessory after the fact, but central to the debacle was the fact that DNA evidence was not taken into account in the charging decisions. And expert evidence suggested that the murder had to have been committed by two people.

The Serious Crimes Commission, which was spurred by the Middleton trial debacle, recommended that Bermuda examine the possibility of ending the rule but it should only be changed after the "widest possible consultation and only after the opinions and desires of all the disparate elements of the community are known".

"Nothing has been done," said Mr. Barritt of the Serious Crimes Commission's recommendation. "I wish the Attorney General could convince me otherwise but absolutely nothing has been done."

Attorney General Dame Lois Browne Evans said that any Government action on the recommendation would now have to wait until after Mr. Barritt's motion is debated in the House of Assembly.

Government has already implemented some of the Commission's recommendations, she said.

"He (Mr. Barritt) should wait until we do all the recommendations... His motion came first and since he couldn't wait let's see where the motion goes," she said.

Supporters of Mr. Barritt's motion can be found on both sides of the political divide. Dame Lois is not one of them. But Government backbencher Wayne Perinchief has already gone on the record to say that developments in the UK offered a "limited opportunity" to reopen the Rebecca Middleton case.

"There's going to be a change in legislation in Britain and when that happens we would be bound to follow precedent in England... I would think that would allow the opportunity to have a new trial," said Mr. Perinchief in October last year.

Parliament resumes on Friday.