A 41-year-old housewife who starved, tortured and ultimately killed her domestic worker from Myanmar stared blankly into space as she was sentenced to 30 years’ jail.
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In sentencing Gaiyathiri Murugayan, High Court judge See Kee Oon yesterday said: “Words cannot describe the abject cruelty of the accused’s appalling conduct.”
He described the case as “among the worst type of culpable homicide”, noting that the victim was made to suffer agonising harm for a long time before she died.
The judge said that while the sentence should “signal societal outrage and abhorrence”, the fact that Gaiyathiri was suffering from a psychiatric condition that affected her judgment cannot be ignored.
Gaiyathiri had pleaded guilty in February to 28 charges.
The most serious was culpable homicide, for which prosecutors had sought the maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The other charges were mostly hurt-related offences involving varying degrees of physical abuse she inflicted on 24-year-old Piang Ngaih Don, who weighed a mere 24kg when she died on July 26, 2016, from the final assault.
In sentencing arguments, defence counsel Joseph Chen sought a jail term of eight to nine years.
Chen painted his client as a mentally disordered mother who had just given birth and was struggling to cope with her children’s illnesses, which she believed were caused by the maid’s poor hygiene.
Gaiyathiri was assessed to have developed major depressive disorder while she was pregnant with her second child.
Chen asked the court to place more weight on rehabilitation so that there would be a “healing effect” for her and other mothers suffering from postnatal depression.
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However, deputy public prosecutor Mohamed Faizal Mohamed Abdul Kadir countered: “A mental disorder is not a free pass.”
He noted that Gaiyathiri’s condition was the reason the charge for killing Piang was reduced from murder.
“The violence is a function of the accused viewing the victim as a lesser human being, ” he said.
Piang, who started working for the family on May 28, 2015, was assaulted almost daily for months.
The incidents in the last month of her life were captured on surveillance cameras that Gaiyathiri and her then husband, Kevin Chelvam, a policeman, had installed in their Bishan flat.
Surveillance footage showed Gaiyathiri pouring cold water on her domestic helper, slapping, pushing, punching, kicking and stomping on her.
In the last 12 days of her life, she was tied to the window grille at night while she slept on the floor.
Chelvam, 42, faces multiple charges in connection with the abuse of Piang. Gaiyathiri’s mother, Prema S. Naraynasamy, 62, who often stayed with the couple in the flat, was also charged in 2016.
Their cases are pending in court. — The Straits Times/ANN