by STAFF WRITER
CASTRIES, St. Lucia, Jan 18, CMC – Former Soca Monarch Jonathan St. Rose was released from prison on Wednesday after the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court of Appeal accepted his appeal against the 20 year-jail sentence he had received after being convicted of murder in June last year.
His attorney, Shawn Innocent, said the Appeal Court had accepted the argument that the High Court judge had erred when he imposed the sentence on January 23rd last year on his client, Lynden Blasse and Marvin Terry Nelson after they were convicted of murdering Dwayne ‘Chubby’ James on February 14, 2009.
“The sentencing judge had erred by not having properly applied the principle with respect to how time spent on remand is taken into account for the purpose of determining the length of the custodial sentence,’ Innocent told the online publication, St. Lucia News Online.
He said the Court of Appeal found that the sentencing judge was wrong to have adopted a benchmark of 20 years imprisonment and also not having considered the guilty plea entered by the defendants as being a mitigating factor in determining sentence.
“Accordingly, the Court of Appeal set aside the sentencing by the High Court judge and substituted sentence of time served.”
St. Rose, who used the stage name, “Ninja Dan” along with the two convicted men had pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter and were each sentenced to 20 years in prison on June 23, last year, after serving seven years and four months on remand.
St. Rose told St. Lucia News Online that his immediate priority would be to engage in “damage control….and just take it one step at a time.”
He said he is also working on getting a video done for his latest release ‘Justice Denied’, which he wrote while in prison.
CMC/es/ir/2017
