“Mason Five” to learn their fates today

By Aaron Humes: Four of the five men convicted last December of the beheading murder of Llewellyn Lucas at Mile 31, George Price Highway four years ago, on Tuesday sought the mercy they did not give their victim.

This morning the alleged ringleader, William “Danny” Mason, will take his turn before Justice Antoinette Moore.

Norman Rodriguez, attorney for one of the convicts – Ashton Vanegas, explained after court Tuesday, “The four men came before the court convicted of the crime of murder.  Murder is a brutal crime.  So if you think about the people who are looking in from the outside, what do they see?  A murderer. What really happens at mitigation is that the person’s life from birth through childhood, schooling and so on is presented to the court so that the judge, in the case of where there is a jury too, can get a look at the person‘s environment from where he or she came from and all other factors related to the person‘s development, from childhood to adulthood, or at least to the point where they were remanded. That comes through the mitigation witnesses because if you look at it as how the court sees them at this time, you are looking at five convicted men and if you are looking at these convicted men then the court in imposing its sentence would go by what is before it.  But after it has heard the mitigation witnesses, that kind of might soften up what the court sees and prompt the court to give a lower sentence.”

And the quartet swore they had never done anything like this before; had led mostly productive lives until aligning themselves with Mason. They were careful to apologize for the waste of it all but not for something they still insist they did not do.

It appears that the Crown, represented by Director of Public Prosecutions Cheryl Lynn Vidal, will not seek capital punishment, and so according to Rodriguez, it is merely a matter of determining just how much time they will spend behind bars, the maximum being the remainder of their natural lives.

Proceedings resume at 9 a.m. and we will have the result whenever it is handed down.

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