SINGAPORE - A 41-year-old housewife who starved, tortured and ultimately killed her domestic worker from Myanmar stared blankly into space as she was sentenced on Tuesday (June 22) to 30 years in prison – the longest jail term meted out here in a maid abuse case.
In sentencing Gaiyathiri Murugayan, High Court judge See Kee Oon said: "Words cannot adequately describe the abject cruelty of the accused's appalling conduct."
He described the case as "among the worst cases of culpable homicide", noting that the victim was made to endure agonising physical and psychological harm for a long time before she died.
The victim, 24-year-old Piang Ngaih Don, who weighed 39kg when she started working for the family on May 28, 2015, weighed a mere 24 kg when she died on July 26, 2016, from the final assault.
However, Justice See was not persuaded by prosecutors’ arguments that the court’s “righteous anger” should be invoked to hand down a life term.
“The sentence of the court is not and indeed should not be based on an overriding visceral sense of indignation,” he said.
The judge said that while the sentence must “signal societal outrage and abhorrence”, the fact that Gaiyathiri was suffering from a psychiatric condition that affected her judgment cannot be ignored.
Gaiyathiri was assessed by several psychiatrists to have suffered from post-partum depression and obsessive compulsive personality disorder. These conditions had significantly contributed to her offences.
He noted that Gaiyathiri had four previous domestic helpers who did not lodge any reports against her and did not appear to be a pathologically violent person.
Gaiyathiri had pleaded guilty in February to 28 charges, the most serious being one for culpable homicide, for which she was handed 20 years’ jail.
More at https://www.straitstimes.com/singap...-woman-who-starved-and-tortured-maid-to-death
