Kim Brannon is Sentenced for Manslaughter of Common Law Husband
Kim Brannon
A case of domestic dispute ended today before Justice Troadio Gonzalez. After pleading guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, Kim Royaline Brannon, who is now forty-five years, learnt her fate in her retrial. Brannon was accused of killing her common law-husband, Anthony Herrera, on December eighteenth, 2008 at their Burrell Boom house. In the course of the trial, the abusive relationship Brannon endured was told to the court for the first time because in her 2011 murder trial, Brannon pleaded not guilty to murdering Herrera, but was found guilty and sentenced to life. From the dock she explained why she chopped and killed Herrera. Brannon told the court that she met him at the age of fourteen and since then she lived a life of physical as well as physiological abuse and had marks on her body to show. In an emotional state, she claimed Herrera also sexually abused her and that while she left him several times, she went back because he threatened her life as well as that of her family. The mother of three told the court that to protect her children she placed them in her mother’s care and before leaving the stand, Brannon said she turned to drugs as a means of escaping the abuse she was enduring for twenty-four years. In concluding, Brannon apologized to Herrera’s family for taking his life. On sentencing, the Judge relied on the sentence of two women who lived in abusive relationships: Lavern Longsworth and Veola Pook. Brannon was sentenced to eight years late this evening, but will only have to spend six months and seventeen days because she was has spent seven years and four months on remand. On November fifteenth, 2011 Brannon was convicted of murder before Judge Herbert Lord and sentenced to life. On appeal, on October twenty-eighth 2013, that conviction and sentence were squashed and a retrial was ordered. In her first trial, Brannon pleaded not guilty and her defence was that men came to her house looking for drugs and when they did not find the drugs, they chopped him up.
