with a "guilty" verdict, adding a strong recommendation for mercy. MacGregor was unmoved, and sentenced Hylton to death by hanging. Appeals, petitions, execution An appeal against the verdict was dismissed in January 1955, by Jamaica's Supreme Court. The court considered that Hylton's response to the provocation he suffered was "entirely disproportionate", and confirmed his conviction and sentence. His lawyers then sought leave to appeal to the Privy Council in London, but on 21 April Hylton learned that leave had been refused. His one remaining hope was that Jamaica's colonial governor, Sir Hugh Foot, would grant a reprieve, and a petition requesting clemency was arranged, supported by many of the colony's leading citizens. On 9 May the governor rejected the petition, and announced that the execution would take place on 17 May. Hylton appeared to accept his fate with a stoical dignity and calm. In his last weeks he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. Shortly before the execution he was visited in the death cell by his former playing colleague Stollmeyer, who described Hylton as dressed in a white gown and looking like a high priest. "It seemed a great shame that one so powerful and vital should have to pay the full penalty, but his temper had let him down for the last time". On the morning of 17 May, large crowds held a silent vigil outside St Catherine District prison. Hylton was hanged, after refusing the traditional last breakfast, and his body buried within the prison compound. The previous day, in Barbados, the West Indies were playing in a Test match against Australia. One of the Jamaicans in the side, J.K. Holt, was having a difficult time in the field, dropping several catches. With what the cricket writer and commentator Tony Cozier describes as "a ghoulish sense of humour", spectators displayed a banner reading "Hang Holt, Save Hylton". Aftermath Hylton's international cricket career was brief, its main impact confined to a single Test series, but was sufficient for later commentators to describe his combination with Constantine and Martindale as a forerunner of the great West Indies pace partnerships of the 1970s and 1980s. In general, however, the cricket world chose to erase Hylton from its collective memory. Little if anything of his career was published in cricket histories. A brief obituary appeared in the 1956 Wisden, but gave no details as to the manner of his death;