JAMAICA’S chief prosecutor Paula Llewellyn, King’s Counsel, has described as “tempered” recommendations by her office for a 40-year minimum life sentence instead of the present 30 years for murder convicts who have pleaded guilty, pointing out that to take it higher would backfire.
The proposal was placed on the table following the recent decision by the Court of Appeal’s to reduce the 31-year pre-parole sentence handed down to Quacie Hart, who is serving a life sentence for murdering 14-year-old Jamaica College student Nicholas Francis in 2016.
According to the Appeal Court, the trial judge erred in arriving at the sentence handed down by using a starting point of 40 years when life imprisonment is deemed to be 30 years in the law. On that score the Appeal Court set the sentence aside and instead reduced the time to be served by Hart to 20 years.
“When the judgement was handed down, when we thought about it, we decided that given the state of crime in the country where in our case files and the police as well have been seeing very heinous crimes bearing in mind that the Criminal Justice Administration [amendment] Act which had indicated that life imprisonment was deemed to be 30 years in 2015, given what is happening as a matter of policy, we could recommend to the executive that they could consider increasing the number of years to 40 years for capital murder,” Llewellyn said on Thursday.
The DPP, in responding to views by some members at a Rotary Club of Kingston meeting that 50 years would have been a more appropriate period, said, “what the court was saying is that the starting point cannot be more than what the law deems to be life imprisonment in circumstances where the accused has pleaded guilty.”