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 to 30 years' jail on Tuesday (June 22). In sentencing Gaiyathiri Murugayan, High Court judge See Kee Oon 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. 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 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...