Lyndon Sheed (centre) during his trial in the High Court at Christchurch. Photo / Kurt Bayer
Lyndon Sheed (centre) during his trial in the High Court at Christchurch. Photo / Kurt Bayer
A patched Mongols MC member involved in a gang-pad killing on New Year’s Eve will continue to serve time behind bars after his appeal on his sentence and conviction was dismissed earlier this month.
Lyndon Paul Sheed was found guilty last year of manslaughter after standing trial for the killing of Kane Wayman who was beaten at a Christchurch gang-pad and died on New Year’s Day, 2021.
Sheed was initially charged with murder but found guilty of manslaughter and later sentenced in the High Court at Christchurch to five years and six months imprisonment.
He has since tried to appeal his conviction and sentence - something the Court of Appeal had dismissed in a recently released decision saying it did not accept the grounds put forward by the convicted killer.
The jury found Sheed had administered the fatal blow to Wayman’s head that night when he was attacked for allegedly disrespecting people at the party and acting out.
Wayman, who was 46 at the time, had been attacked by three men, including Sheed, after he was “ejected” from the gang pad. He was punched and kicked, even when he lay defenceless on the ground.
He was driven to the hospital by a woman he had been seeing. Battered and badly injured he was laid out on the back seat of a car and driven to Christchurch hospital where he was pronounced dead.
His body showed signs of an assault, including facial, head and neck injuries and a pathologist found his cause of death to be blunt head trauma and neck compression injuries on the background of heart problems and methamphetamine use.
“In her [the pathologist’s] opinion, the degree of post-mortem changes suggested he was dead or actively dying before he was placed in the car,” the decision said.
Christchurch man Kane Wayman, 46, died on January 1, 2021.
The woman who drove him said Sheed had come to the driver’s window before leaving for the hospital and said “[you] f******* hear nothing, you f****** see nothing. Did you hear?”.
The woman was a key witness in the trial, and had identified Sheed, who she had slept with that night, as “the dad” and man who administered a “king hit”.
Two others who stood trial for Wayman’s death, including Sheed’s daughter Liz and Mongols prospect Mitchell Carston, were acquitted of murder at the trial last year.
Sheed’s lawyer Len Andersen KC put forward three grounds when appealing the 2022 conviction at a hearing in August this year.
Andersen argued there was no admissible identification of Sheed as “the dad”, that the woman’s account of the fatal punch was not reliable, and the evidence did not prove the blow caused the man’s death.
A reduction in his sentence of five years and six months was also sought by Andersen, claiming the time given should have been no more than four years and in line with other “one punch” manslaughter cases.
Andersen said an allowance should have been made for “personal mitigating factors”, including learning difficulties, familial disconnection and poor role-modelling in early life.
“We do not accept these submissions,” the court said in the decision.
They went on to state they were not pursued the sentencing judge was wrong when denying discounts for personal mitigating factors, describing the connection between that and his offending as “weak.
“The (cultural) report states that Mr Sheed attributes the offending to intoxication at the time and his responsibility as the gang member “on watch” to “sort it out”. However, his intoxication at the time is not a mitigating factor,” the decision said.
Sheed joined the Mongols in 2012. Wayman was not connected to the gang and, according to the decision, may have met Sheed just one time before he died.
Hazel Osborne is an Open Justice reporter for NZME and is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She joined the Open Justice team at the beginning of 2022, previously working in Whakatāne as a court and crime reporter in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.
