Magistrate orders whipping, too, for $4.5M robber
PRINCIPAL Magistrate Krishendat Persaud has ordered that convicted thief Herman Frazer alias ‘Sito’, 20, receive five strokes.

The prisoner, of Port Mourant Hospital Doctors’ Quarters, will get the whipping while serving a five-year jail sentence imposed on him last Friday in New Amsterdam Court.

Frazer, who has previous convictions, pleaded guilty to robbing a woman of cash and jewels in a $4,536,300 robbery.

Police Sergeant Fazil Karimbaksh, prosecuting, said the virtual complainant, Zainamoon Rampersaud is a vendor who sells at Rose Hall town arch, another part of Corentyne, Berbice, where she was pounced upon last July 21.

The Prosecutor said Frazer and an accomplice, who is still large, robbed the victim, at gunpoint, of a bag containing 594 pieces of jewellery she was to sell, a digital scale and other things.

JULY 29, 2003

 Student robber serving 15 years spared whipping

SEYDEL Bourne, 26, now serving a 15-year jail term for robbery was spared the seven strokes he was to get when the Guyana Court of Appeal removed the whipping from his sentence.

 

Chancellor Cecil Kennard and Justices of Appeal Maurice Churaman and Lennox Perry ordered the removal because they found no proof that the prisoner had used violence to perpetrate the crime.

But they did not agree with Mr Nigel Hughes, for the appellant, that the imprisonment was severe. Instead the judges held it was adequate and refused a reduction.

The Appellate Court accepted, however, that the trial judge had failed to address the jury adequately on the identification testimony.

Consequently, the Justices of Appeal applied the proviso that the remaining evidence was so strong, a jury properly directed would have arrived at the same guilty verdict.

Bourne was one of two men who took away Bishops' High School student Anil Gangadin's bicycle after carrying him on it along several city streets.

Police said one of the robbers had brandished a gun during the September 4, 1991 incident

Guyana Chronicle, 28 November 1998