Businessman's sentencing for killing ex-girlfriend postponed again
Published:Friday | October 7, 2016 | 12:00 AMLivern Barrett
A lengthy prison sentence would devastate convicted businessman Steven Causwell, noted psychologist Dr Barrington Davidson has suggested.
Davidson indicated that he had first-hand knowledge of the conditions in the nation's prisons and declared that rehabilitation was "almost impossible".
"It feels like you are actually destroying a human being," said Davidson, who was giving expert testimony yesterday during Causwell's sentencing hearing in the Home Circuit Court.
"I was hoping that our [penal] system would have come up with something that doesn't destroy people, but give them a chance to right the wrong," said the head of Family Life Ministries.
The 40-year-old businessman was scheduled to be sentenced yesterday for killing his ex-girlfriend, Nadia Mitchell, at her Oakland apartment in 2008. However, the sentencing was postponed for a second time as presiding judge Carol Lawrence-Beswick said she needed more time to consider legal arguments made by his lead attorney, Jacqueline Samuels-Brown.
"The documents you shared with me are worthy of mature considerations," Lawrence-Beswick told Samuels-Brown.
Causwell is now scheduled to be sentenced on Monday.
Emotional breakdown
Before the postponement, Mitchell's teenage daughter, Imani Prendergast, had an emotional breakdown.
It came as Samuels-Brown, in addressing the court, pointed to evidence presented during the trial that Causwell attempted to resuscitate Mitchell on the day her body was found in the yard at her gated apartment complex and suggested that this showed how much respect he had for her.
"Respect?" Prendergast interrupted.
Her grandmother and other relatives tried frantically to silence her, but the teen would have none of it.
After shaking free from her grandmother's grasp, an emotional Prendergast admonished Samuels-Brown: "Don't talk about respect when he is there beating my mother."
She then stormed out of the courtroom.
Samuels-Brown resumed her submission, asserting: "I am almost certain that was contrived."