Nearly 36 years after he brutally killed his three-year-old toddler and hid the child’s body, a convicted murderer has received a revised prison sentence that will see him walk free in less than four years. The outcome comes after a landmark judicial shift that has opened the door to resentencing for dozens of death row inmates whose sentences were previously converted to life imprisonment.
The case in question centers on 73-year-old Phinis Warren, who was originally handed a death sentence for the 1988 murder of his young son, Ronald Koylass. The grim details of the crime, laid out in original court proceedings, paint a disturbing picture: after taking custody of Ronald in mid-1988, neighbors repeatedly documented clear signs of abuse on the toddler, including burst lips and a missing tooth. Witnesses also recalled Warren making explicit comments justifying violent discipline against children.
By October 1988, Ronald had vanished entirely. When police first questioned Warren, he spun a false story that he had handed the child over to an unknown man he claimed was Ronald’s biological father, a lead that investigators were never able to verify or trace. Under further interrogation, Warren eventually confessed: the boy had died while in his care in late September 1988, and he had stuffed the toddler’s body into a maroon bag before dumping it at Mora Dam using a hand-built bamboo raft. To this day, despite extensive search efforts, Ronald’s remains have never been recovered.
Warren was formally charged with murder and went to trial at the San Fernando High Court, where a jury found him guilty in May 1991. He was sentenced to death, and his appeal against the conviction was rejected by the country’s Appeal Court in 1994. Four years later, a landmark ruling by the Privy Council – the highest appellate body for many former British Caribbean territories – in the Jamaican case Pratt and Morgan v Attorney General of Jamaica changed the trajectory of his sentence. The ruling held that executing prisoners who had waited more than five years on death row constituted cruel and inhumane treatment, leading to Warren’s death sentence being commuted to 75 years of hard labor.
In 2023, another landmark Privy Council ruling in the case of Naresh Boodram upended sentencing rules once again, establishing that inmates serving converted life sentences were eligible to apply for resentencing. The High Court identified 23 convicted murderers who qualified to have their sentences reviewed under the new ruling, and Warren was counted among that group.
During his resentencing hearing held this week, High Court Judge Hayden St Clair-Douglas reviewed the details of the case, the time Warren had already served, and the progress he had made in custody. Defense attorney Davina Inalsingh argued that a 45-year determinate sentence was the appropriate outcome for the case, a submission the judge ultimately accepted.
At the time of the resentencing, Warren had already spent 37 years and seven months behind bars. Judge St Clair-Douglas also deducted an additional four years from the sentence in recognition of documented rehabilitative progress Warren has made during his incarceration. When the math is finalized, Warren is left with just three years and five months remaining on his sentence before he is eligible for release.
In issuing the revised sentence, Judge St Clair-Douglas emphasized that the court did not minimize the gravity of Warren’s crime or the irreversible harm done by the killing of a defenceless child. He noted that the revised sentence was crafted to strike a careful balance between three core goals of criminal justice: punishing the offender for his crime, deterring others from committing similar acts of violence, and acknowledging the potential for rehabilitation even in the most serious of cases.