![['Philip Wayne Pynn was back in Newfoundland Supreme Court in St. John’s Monday. The court offered earlier court dates for Pynn and Butler, but their lawyers opted to keep the fall dates.']](https://saltwire.imgix.net/philip-wayne-pynn-2546175.jpg?cs=srgb&fit=crop&h=568&w=847&dpr=1&auto=format%2Ccompress%2Cenhance)
MONCTON, N.B. — Philip Wayne Pynn’s attempt to get out of jail has been denied again.
About seven months after the Parole Board of Canada revoked his statutory release, his application to appeal that decision was turned down earlier this week by the board’s appeals division.
“The appeal division finds that the board did not base its decision on erroneous or incomplete information,” it stated in its written decision. “Rather, the board based its decision on relevant, reliable and persuasive file information and on your responses during the hearing.”
That file information relates to reports that in April, the week prior to Pynn’s suspension, it was found he was doing drugs and associating with people involved in criminal activity, which breached his special release conditions.
Pynn had submitted a urinalysis test, which came back positive for cannabis and morphine.
In an attempt to explain this positive result, he said he had gone to a house with a woman and there was a man at the house where they smoked a bong, and that he smoked it before you knew there was morphine in it.
But the parole board didn’t buy it.
“The board was reasonable to conclude that you breached two special conditions,” the appeals division’s decisions states, “that this showed a disregard for the rules and conditions of your release, and that considering your criminal history, you present an undue risk to society on statutory release.”
While this was the first federal prison term for Pynn — who in July 2011 was armed with a loaded firearm when he mistakenly shot and killed his friend, Nick Winsor, in a residential garage on Portugal Cove Road — he has been convicted of several other crimes, including possession of controlled substances, evading police, impaired driving, property crimes, multiple weapons and firearms-related convictions, and violent offences such as assault and assault with a weapon.
In 2014, while incarcerated at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary (HMP), he was involved in a riot in the chapel with a group of inmates attempting to cut and stab a fellow inmate.
His record also contains 66 breaches of court orders.
As an adult, between May 2004 and May 2011, Pynn served 11 provincial jail terms. During these terms of incarceration, he incurred close to 100 institutional charges — 50 of them between July 2011 and August 2014 at HMP, including failing drug tests, assaults, fighting, failure to comply, vandalism and possessing contraband drugs. He was also identified as the founder of a prison gang while in prison — St. John’s Mob Squad.
