A woman who hit another woman with flat side of a machete, and damaged an air conditioner and a car with the weapon, has had her prison sentence reduced by seven months.
Danya Sherie Ebanks, who had been convicted of a number of offences, including common assault and damage to property in relation to incidents that occurred in 2017, and with threatening her landlord in 2022, was originally sentenced to 25 months in prison.
The court at her sentencing appeal on Friday, 22 March, heard that Ebanks, before dawn one morning in 2017, had gone to a residence in West Bay, with a machete, because she had mistakenly believed the stepson of the woman living there had taken $20 from her.
After causing $250 worth of damage to the woman’s air conditioning unit with the machete, and leaving the scene to go to to work, she subsequently found the $20, and later apologised, the court heard.
Also in 2017, at Countryside Shopping Village in Savannah, she had slapped a woman across the face, and then, in a store, about eight weeks later, assaulted that same woman with a machete, hitting her with the flat side of it on her upper arm, leaving a bruise. She also damaged the woman’s car with the weapon.
In 2022, after her landlord told her she was being evicted for what he believed was illegal activities at the property, she sent him threatening notes over social media, leading to a charge of causing fear or provocation of violence.
Ebanks had pleaded guilty to these offences in 2022.
Her lawyer, Kathleen Ryan, told Justice Cheryll Richards that, when passing sentence, Magistrate Angelyn Hernandez, now chief magistrate, had not given her client the standard one-third discount in her sentence for her guilty pleas. She also claimed he failed to give sufficient weight to character references that had been received from a friend and from a colleague of Ebanks.
Richards said that the sentencing magistrate may have indeed given the usual one-third discount for the guilty pleas, but it was not clear that he had done so from the court records.
In the “absence of clarity”, she granted the one-third discount to three of the offences for which Ebanks was imprisoned. Ebanks is also serving a two-month sentence for traffic offences and one month for failing to surrender.
In total, she will spend 18 months in prison, rather than the original 25.
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