Jamaican Tedesha AnnJuliet Hayles who admitted to killing fellow sex worker Shockaya Boyd has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
However, the manslayer has just over three years left to serve on that sentence, after Justice Randall Worrell took into consideration several factors including the aggravating and mitigating features of the case, the time she had spent on remand and her guilty plea.
Hayles had pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty of manslaughter in Boyd’s stabbing death which occurred along Bay Street, St Michael on April 28, 2017.
The two sex workers were working that Friday but were not on friendly terms. Outlining the facts of the deadly incident at a previous court sitting Principal Crown Counsel Alliston Seale revealed that a man in a white car, drove up to the then 26-year-old Hayles and requested she accompany him home along with 34-year-old Boyd but she declined. The client went to Boyd and spoke to her.
“After she finished talking with him she start cursing me and calling me names and come up in my face,” Hayles wrote in a police statement adding that Boyd pushed her and she pushed back before a third woman came and separated them.
“She pulled out of Tash hand and run around Tash and went in her bag for a knife, while I pulled my scissors. She poke at me and skipping and I hold her hand where the knife was . . . and I managed to get the knife from her and poke her three times.”
She then left the scene with the knife and subsequently threw it away. When police initially detained her, she said: “Miss, she come up in my face and I had to defend myself.”
In handing down his ruling in the No. 2 Supreme Court this morning Justice Worrell pointed to the aggravating features of Hayles’ crime and stated that a weapon was used during its commission.
“But one cannot say that there is any record that you armed yourself specifically for this particular matter. There is no evidence also to suggest that you armed yourself for this particular conflict and act which followed and led to the death of the deceased.
“The court has taken into consideration based on the facts that there was no premeditation either. Clearly there is evidence of confrontation and also of the deceased being the instigator,” the judge said as Hayles stood in the dock with her head bowed and at times wiping tears from her face using her black shirt.
Mitigating in her favour, Justice Worrell said, was the fact that she had no previous convictions, her age, her contrition and the fact that she cooperated with the police. He also touched on information that her sick grandmother was currently taking care of her six-year-old son back in Jamaica.
The court looked at all those factors, he said including the mitigating and aggravating features and was of the opinion that the 12-year sentence should be reduced by two years bringing it to ten years or 3,650 days.
The convict’s guilty plea which is a discount of 1,216 days was also credited as well the 1,036 days she had spent on remand.
“You have spent close to three years on remand. The court has to take into consideration . . .the intent to the three months’ relief that is normally granted by the prison . . . 90 days by three, that is 270 days that has also to be deducted.”
Given those deductions Hayles will spend, as of today, the remaining 1,128 days at HMP Dodds.
As she walked out the dock a tearful Hayles hugged her attorney Sian Lange before being escorted out of the court by prison officials.
