Ex-security guard’s moving pleas fail to cut jail time

Kenroy Rowe

(CNS): A Jamaican man who is serving six years in jail for wounding with intent earlier this year, after he stabbed a customer with a flick knife while working at a George Town bar, has failed in his bid to cut his jail term. In an emotional plea to the appeal court panel, in which Kenroy Leonard Rowe was unrepresented, the former security guard nervously stuttered through his entreaty to the court that he was filled with remorse, had learned his lesson and had now no way to provide for his child, to whom he said he had been “both a father and a mother”.

As he appealed to the panel to reduce his sentence, Rowe said that his son was not able to go to school and life was very difficult for the child.

Justice Sir Richard Field, who spoke for the panel, said they had noted how sorry Rowe was in his moving address to the court and the difficulties he now faced but there was no basis on which to reduce the sentence. He said the sentence was not wrong or manifestly excessive, given the seriousness of the offence. In light of the severity of the wound inflicted on his victim, Justice Field said, Rowe was lucky not to be serving a far longer term because he could have been convicted of attempted murder, or even murder if the man had not survived the chest wound, which had caused his lung to collapse.

Rowe stabbed the man during an altercation outside the Energy Bar on Shedden Road with a knife he had confiscated from another customer. At trial Rowe had claimed self-defence but witnesses and CCTV footage cast considerable doubt on the claim.

Security guard jailed for six years