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The National Newspaper of St. Vincent and the Grenadines OFFICEJET 8620

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FRIDAY,

FEBRUARY 27, 2015

VOLUME 109, No.09

www.thevincentian.com

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Patrick Lovelace gets a reprieve on his death penalty as his appeal against his sentence goes before the Privy Council. by HAYDN HUGGINS

Attorney Kay BacchusBrowne, attorney for Patrick Lovelace, cites the recent Privy Council ruling as a reason for retaining the Privy Council as our final Court of Appeal.

THIS COUNTRY’S lone death row inmate, Patrick Lovelace, has been granted leave to appeal his sentence to the judicial committee of the Privy Council. The decision came close to a year after the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal refused an application by lawyers representing Lovelace, for extension of time to file an appeal against sentence. The former long distance runner of Belmont was sentenced to death February 26, 2010, for the July 2002 murder of 12-year-old female pannist, Lokeisha Nanton of Sion Hill. A 12-member jury had found Lovelace guilty July 15, 2009, following a retrial. Nanton’s nude body was found hanging from a mango

tree in an area at Sion Hill called London Road, on the morning of July 2, 2002. An autopsy revealed she was strangled. In a judgement handed down March 2012, the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal had dismissed Lovelace’s appeal against conviction, but UK-based lawyer, Shiraz Aziz, who had conducted the appeal on Lovelace’s behalf, did not appeal the sentence. On January 24, 2014, local attorney Kay Bacchus-Browne, who was subsequently retained, in conjunction with the British Law Firm Simons, Muirhead and Burton, filed an application before the Appeal Court for extension of time to file the appeal against Lovelace’s sentence. However, in an order dated

March 5, 2014, the Appeal Court stated that it did not have the right to extend the time in which to appeal against sentence, in the case of a conviction involving a sentence of death. Lovelace’s lawyers appealed the Appeal Court’s order, to the Privy Council, and have been successful. In a recent letter to Bacchus-Browne, lawyers representing Lovelace in the Privy Council wrote, ‘I am writing to inform you that we have just been informed that Patrick Lovelace has been granted permission to appeal against sentence to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’. The letter added, ‘I should be extremely grateful if you would inform Mr. Lovelace of

this development, and that in due course we will have an appeal set down for hearing’. When contacted on Tuesday, Bacchus-Browne told THE VINCENTIAN, “Once again we see the importance of retaining the Privy Council as our final Court of Appeal. If this appeal was not approved, he (Lovelace) was most likely to be hanged soon.” Bacchus-Browne added, “I will continue to fight for my client to have him removed from death row because I don’t believe in the death penalty. I think it is inhumane, degrading and barbaric, and that’s why I keep fighting for his (Lovelace) life.” Continued on Page 3.

GOVERNMENT DID NOT ‘MAKE A KILLING’ PRIME MINISTER Dr Ralph Gonsalves has denied that government ‘made a killing’ on LPG gas before the last reduction. Gonsalves said, in his response to a question posed during a press briefing last Tuesday, that the allegation was total rubbish, and that if

it were any one entity that would have made huge profits, it would be the importers of LPG — Rubis. “The importers, that is to say Rubis, if anybody was making a killing because there is a build-up in the normal way and in relation to the pricing mechanism,”

Gonsalves explained. He said that the government used the system of the threemonth rolling average and the bonus-malus system, which is used in a number of business arrangements which alternately reward (bonus) or penalize (malus).

Meanwhile, Rubis’ Managing Director, Mauricio Nicholls, had written to the Ministry of Trade indicating that the new pricing for LPG gas was significantly lower than the acquisition price which would result in negative margins for the company.


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