A 30-year-old man from Manzanilla has been sentenced to a little over 17 years in prison after admitting to murdering an elderly businessman during a botched kidnapping attempt in 2014.
Arnold Ashton, of Nariva Road, Manzanilla, was awaiting trial for murder for well over a decade before he was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser offence of felony murder based on a plea agreement with the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) negotiated by his attorneys Shawn Morris and Janiel Chuck.
Under the felony murder rule, the mandatory death penalty for murder is waived in circumstances where death occurred during the commission of a lesser criminal offence.
Ashton was sentenced by High Court Judge Gail Gonzales on Friday.
In determining the appropriate sentence for him, Justice Gonzales began with a starting point of 27 years in prison based on the circumstances of the crime he committed.
After applying discounts for Ashton’s attempts at rehabilitation whilst on remand and reducing the sentence by a third duty to his guilty plea, Ashton was left with a remaining sentence of 17 years and four months.
He is expected to complete the sentence in six years, five months, and 17 days as the time he spent on remand before being allowed to enter the plea was deducted from his sentence.
Ashton and his neighbour Leonelle Clement were accused of murdering 62-year-old John Ramoutar in July 2014.
Ramoutar, a former teacher and the owner of a sawmill mill in Manzanilla, left home to attend to his livestock on the parcel of land he owned near the duo’s homes.
When he did not return home hours later, his daughter-in-law called his cellphone. She claimed Ramoutar answered but sounded in distress.
When she called back minutes later, a man answered and told her that Ramoutar owed him money.
When Ramoutar’s son called his father’s phone, the man who answered demanded a $200,000 ransom for his release.
Ramoutar’s family and employees went to land where they found his pick-up truck abandoned but not him.
When they were arrested days later, Ashton and Clement, who were 19 and 21 years old at the time, admitted that they killed Ramoutar and showed the police the swampy area where they dumped his body.
Ashton claimed that he had a gun he borrowed from a friend, and Clement had a cutlass when they attacked Ramoutar.
He claimed Clement instructed him to kill Ramoutar after he resisted and tried to break free from them.
Although he claimed that he held Ramoutar face-down in a pool of water until he stopped breathing, an autopsy performed after his body was recovered revealed that he suffered a fatal neck fracture.
Clement was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser offence in November 2024 and received a similar sentence.
The DPP’s Office was represented by Josanne Forrester.
