A Singaporean woman who starved, assaulted and ultimately killed her domestic worker was yesterday sentenced to 30 years in prison, with the judge describing the case as “among the worst types of culpable homicide.”
The abuse inflicted on Burmese national Piang Ngaih Don, 24, was particularly awful and captured on closed-circuit television installed in the family’s home.
The domestic worker was stamped on, strangled, choked, battered with brooms and burnt with an iron, court documents showed.
The domestic worker died in July 2016, after her employer, Gaiyathiri Murugayan, repeatedly assaulted her over several hours.
Gaiyathiri, 41, pleaded guilty in February to 28 charges, including culpable homicide.
After hearing an additional plea of mitigation submitted by Gaiyathiri in a bid to avoid the life sentence sought by the prosecution, Justice See Kee Oon sentenced her to 30 years in prison starting from the date of her arrest in 2016.
See cited the “abject cruelty of the accused’s appalling conduct” in his sentencing, which he said must signal “societal outrage and abhorrence” at the crime.
However, taking into account the defendant’s obsessive compulsive disorder and the depression she developed around the time she gave birth, See said that he did not think that life imprisonment was “fair and appropriate.”
The maid was employed by Gaiyathiri and her husband in 2015 to help take care of their four-year-old daughter and one-year-old son, but Gaiyathiri physically assaulted the victim almost daily, often several times a day, with her 61-year-old mother sometimes joining in, court documents showed.
The domestic worker, who had been employed by the family for more than one year at the time of her death, was only allowed to sleep for five hours per night, and was forced to shower and relieve herself with the door open.
Provided very little food, she lost about 38 percent of her body weight during her employment, and only weighed 24kg at the time of her death.
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