News - Royal Park killing: AG seeks stiffer sentence

The Attorney General is considering an appeal on the basis that the trial judge in the Royal Park murder case had misdirected himself on the law applicable to the offence of murder, Solicitor General C.R. de Silva confirmed yesterday.

Jude Shramantha Jayamaha, was found guilty of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and sentenced to 12 years rigorous imprisonment by the Colombo High Court on Friday for the murder of Yvonne Jonsson, a 19-year-old friend of his last year.

Mr. de Silva, P.C. said the Attorney General said the ‘facts were such that there should have been a conviction for murder. There is no halfway house. The judge has totally misdirected himself on the law’.

Delivering the judgment, High Court judge I.M. Abeyratne stated the punishment, which included a fine of Rs. 300,000, was mitigated considering that the accused was only twenty years old, and had already been in remand for over one year.

The Attorney General had indicted the accused under Section 296 of the Criminal Procedure Code on charges of committing the murder of 19-year-old Yvonne Jonsson at the Royal Park condominium on July 1 last year. Following the guilty verdict, and before the sentence was passed, prosecution counsel Deputy Solicitor General Jayantha Jayasuriya reinforced his argument of the serious nature of the crime, drawing attention to the fact that according to the Judicial Medical Officer, Yvonne, a young fashion design student who had come to Sri Lanka for her summer vacation from the US, had not only received several blows and had her head smashed against the staircase at least twice, but she had also been strangled.

Senior Defence Counsel Daya Perera, PC told The Sunday Times that his clients have two weeks to appeal against the judgement and that no decision has yet been taken on the matter.