Death penalty for Lyn murderers
Published:Thursday | January 21, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Barbara Gayle, Staff Reporter
THE TWO men who were convicted on December 18 last year of the murder of elderly Manchester couple, Richard and Julia Lyn, showed no signs of emotion yesterday when they were given the death penalty.
They are Lennox Swaby, 28, farmer and taxi driver of Hopeton district, Manchester, and Calvin Powell, 26, garbage truck driver of New Green, Manchester.
Defence lawyers Dr Randolph Williams and William Hines, who represented Swaby, and attorney-at-law Robert Armstrong, who represented Powell, had raised strong objections to the death penalty.
Unmerited sentence
They said the case did not merit such a sentence. Senior Puisne Judge Marva McIntosh said the men showed no reasonable prospect for reform because they still maintained their innocence.
Sentences of life imprisonment were imposed for the murder of Richard Lyn, but for the murder of Julia Lyn, the men were sentenced to hang.
The Crown led evidence at the trial in the Home Circuit Court that the couple were strangled between December 9 and 10, 2006, during a robbery at their home in Mandeville.