Farmer who drowned ill wife gets 5 years in jail
By Leeann Li |
December 27, 2012, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
A farmer who drowned his wife, who was paralyzed and in pain, has been sentenced to five years in prison for murder by a court in Lanzhou in northwest China's Gansu Province, the Lanzhou Morning Post reported yesterday.
Jia Zhengwu, 38, pushed his wife, Zhang Xiaojun, in her wheelchair into the Yellow River on an April night in 2011. Zhang had tried to kill herself after years of suffering, the Lanzhou Intermediate People's Court said on Tuesday.
The court said Jia, from Gansu's Jingning County had taken good care of his bedridden wife for years and didn't kill her for an evil purpose, and thus got a lesser penalty. But the court rejected his lawyer's argument that it should be classified as a mercy killing, the paper said.
Zhang was diagnosed in 2003 with ankylosing spondylitis, or chronic inflammation of the spine, which causes back pain and stiffness. She had been paralyzed since 2007. Her treatment also nearly bankrupted her family.
In Jia's first trial, held in October, he sobbed, saying he did it after she had spent 12 hours begging him to kill her when the couple strolled along the river bank in Lanzhou.
"I told her not to lose the will to live because I would make every effort to cure her. But she said we had huge debts and she couldn't pass the burden to our two children," he added. The family had spent 180,000 yuan (US$28,840) on medical treatment.
Despite huge expenses, Zhang's condition didn't improve. She became depressed and told her family she wanted to die, the court found.
Jia Zhengwu, 38, pushed his wife, Zhang Xiaojun, in her wheelchair into the Yellow River on an April night in 2011. Zhang had tried to kill herself after years of suffering, the Lanzhou Intermediate People's Court said on Tuesday.
The court said Jia, from Gansu's Jingning County had taken good care of his bedridden wife for years and didn't kill her for an evil purpose, and thus got a lesser penalty. But the court rejected his lawyer's argument that it should be classified as a mercy killing, the paper said.
Zhang was diagnosed in 2003 with ankylosing spondylitis, or chronic inflammation of the spine, which causes back pain and stiffness. She had been paralyzed since 2007. Her treatment also nearly bankrupted her family.
In Jia's first trial, held in October, he sobbed, saying he did it after she had spent 12 hours begging him to kill her when the couple strolled along the river bank in Lanzhou.
"I told her not to lose the will to live because I would make every effort to cure her. But she said we had huge debts and she couldn't pass the burden to our two children," he added. The family had spent 180,000 yuan (US$28,840) on medical treatment.
Despite huge expenses, Zhang's condition didn't improve. She became depressed and told her family she wanted to die, the court found.
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