A 39-year-old man who was convicted twice for the murder of a former British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television broadcaster and three members of the Cropper family, has applied to the courts in Trinidad to vacate his death sentence.
Danile Agard also wants the court, which will begin hearing his constitutional motion on Wednesday, to have him removed from death row. He has also applied for an interim declaration that any attempt to carry out the death sentence imposed on him on September 13, 2013, and his continued detention on death row, will be in contravention of the Constitution.
Agard had first gone on trial in 2004 along with Lester Pitman and were both convicted and sentenced to hang for the murders of Maggie Lee, 83, Lynette Lithgow-Pearson, 51, and John Cropper, 59, that were committed in December 2001.
Pitman successfully challenged his case at appeal and his death sentence was commuted. He was eventually ordered not to be released before serving at least 40 years in prison.
Lithgow-Pearson was a former television broadcaster with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and along with Cropper; Lee and Lynette were killed at Cropper’s home at Cascade on the outskirts of the capital between December 11 and 12, 2001. Their bodies were found on December 13. They had been bound and gagged with electrical wire and their throats had been slit.
The BBC had reported that Mrs. Pearson, who used the name Lynette Lithgow professionally and had been living in France, was in her native Trinidad working on a book project when she was killed. It said her mother Mrs. Lee, who had been living in Toronto, had joined her there for a holiday.
Agard was the great-nephew of John and the late independent senator Angela Cropper. Lee was his great-grandmother and Pearson his great-aunt. Cropper headed the Cropper Foundation, which sponsored workshops for young writers.
Agard’s lawyers are asking the court on Wednesday for his sentence to be vacated and for him to be removed immediately from the condemned section of the Port of Spain prison.
He successfully appealed his convictions and a retrial was ordered. He was again convicted and three death sentences were again imposed on him on September 13, 2013, which he appealed and lost in July 2019.
In his new application, Agard said he has remained on death row since September 2013, a period of nine years, five months, and 17 days and that so far he has spent 21 years in prison from the time of his arrest and charge in 2001, and 10 years and two months on death row for his two sets of convictions.
His application states he has not contributed to any delay and remains under the sentence of death, which cannot now be lawfully carried out in keeping with the principles set out in the Pratt and Morgan case. The London-based Privy Council has ruled that to carry out a death sentence after more than a five-year delay would be cruel punishment.
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