The Court of Appeal has reduced a 35-year prison sentence for convicted murderer William Ian Rivers, who publicly executed his neighbour, Mark ‘Hubba’ Seymour, while in a state of jealous paranoia.
Cayman’s Conditional Release Act requires that mandatory minimum tariffs are set in all heinous crimes such as murder. In Rivers’s case, sentencing judge, Justice Frank Williams, increased the 30-year mandatory minimum term to 35 years in prison before he would be eligible for parole.
In addition to the five-year departure from Cayman’s mandatory minimum murder tariff, Williams is said to have failed to provide his reasons for increasing Rivers’ sentence – a matter the appeal judges found regrettable.
“This is unfortunate since they are an important feature of his decision that the minimum term should exceed the statutory minimum under Schedule 12 (3) of the Conditional Release of Prisoners Regulations, 2016 by five years,” noted Justice Sir Alan Moses in his written judgment, which was released on Thursday, 11 Jan.
In that judgment, Moses noted that convicted murders Justin Ramoon and Osbourne Douglas, who were convicted of a similarly grizzly murder, were both given lower tariffs of 32 and 33 years, respectively.
The Ramoon and Douglas case was “chillingly clinical in its planning and execution”, as the trial judge… put it,” noted Moses. “The shooting was in the nature of a public execution by two leaders of a notorious gang. They planned their getaway, and attempted deliberately to shoot the victim’s friend, failing only because the gun, which was never recovered, misfired. There were no mental health problems; the killing was plainly an exercise of power in the milieu of Island gangs.”
Moses noted that a term of 35 years, in the absence of the judge’s reason, was excessive. However, he also accepted that River’s killing was deserving of an uplift to mark the gravity of the shooting.
“We have reached the conclusion, overall, that the minimum term should be increased but, taking into account the mitigation, by two years and not five years,” wrote Justice Moses.
A murder, a stand-off and a trial
At about 2pm on 28 Jan. 2017, Mark Travis Seymour was standing outside in the veranda area of Super C’s restaurant, off Watercourse Road in West Bay, drinking a beer and talking to friends when he was approached by Rivers, who was riding a bicycle.
During the trial, witnesses told the judge and jury that upon arriving at the scene, Rivers immediately pulled a gun from his waistband and fired at Seymour, who tried to run away.
As per the trial evidence, Rivers then fired two more shots, hitting Seymour, who fell to the ground while asking, “Ian, why you doing this, man?”
Rivers then fired an additional three shots while standing over Seymour.
Joshua Pars, a witness to the shooting, was also threatened by Rivers but managed to escape the scene after being shot at. However, several years later, Pars would be stabbed to death in an unrelated altercation in the parking lot of a West Bay Road shopping complex.
Rivers offered up a guilty plea to a charge of manslaughter, but this was refused by the prosecution. During the trial, he advanced a defence of diminished mental responsibility.
However, he was unable to put forward concrete medical evidence to support this claim, and was convicted of murder by the jury.
Related Videos
