Vincentian death sentence commuted to life
Published:Friday | June 26, 2009 | 5:55 PM
The UK Privy Council has commuted the death sentence of a convicted murderer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines to life imprisonment.
The man’s attorney had acknowledged that the crime was a brutal and disgusting murder, involving the cold-blooded killing of an elderly man in the course of a robbery.
In November 2004, Daniel Dick Trimmingham was found guilty of the murder of 68-year-old Albert Browne in January 2003.
The court sentenced him to death by hanging.
His appeal against the conviction and sentence was dismissed by the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal in October 2005, but he was granted special leave to argue the matter before the Privy Council, the island’s final court.
The Privy Council ruled that the matter was undeniably a bad case of murder committed for gain.
However in their judgment, the judges felt that the case falls short of warranting the ultimate penalty of capital punishment.