Mahaica man challenges 56-year jail sentence for neighbour’s murder

Fifty-year-old Foster Gravesande, who was found guilty of murdering his neighbour and sentenced to 56 years’ imprisonment, has moved to the Guyana Court of Appeal to have his conviction and sentence overturned.
On December 10, 2020, Gravesande was found guilty by a 12-member jury of the April 9, 2017 murder of 49-year-old Courtney Porter. He had been on trial for the capital offence before Justice Navindra Singh at the Demerara High Court.
It was reported that Porter, a father of three, was beaten in the head with a piece of wood by Gravesande, who had accused him of pulling his wife’s garments. Following the incident, Porter was hospitalised and his attacker was charged with attempting to commit murder and was released on bail.

However, Porter succumbed two weeks after the beating, and Gravesande subsequently fled the area but was captured in another policing division. The charge against him was upgraded to murder. After a Preliminary Inquiry (PI), a Magistrate committed him to stand trial for the offence.
Dissatisfied with the ruling of the trial court, Gravesande has mounted an appeal in which he argued that the verdict of the jury was unreasonable and cannot be supported having regard to the evidence presented at his trial.
Gravesande further argued that the trial Judge failed to sufficiently address the many deficiencies in the prosecution’s case, in particular, the contradicting evidence of the eyewitnesses. Among other things, the murder convict said that his sentence was manifestly excessive and severe in all the circumstances of the case.

Justice Singh, in sentencing Gravesande, started at a base of 60 years but deducted four years for the time the convict spent on remand. The Judge ordered that he only becomes eligible for parole after serving 28 years in jail. (G1)