12 months and 20 years in wife murder cases

27 February 2004

AMSTERDAM — An 83-year-old man has been sentenced to 12 months in jail for strangling his wife, Assen Court said on Friday.

The defendant grabbed his spouse by the throat and pushed her hard against a bookcase while in a rage on 31 May 2002.

But the Pieter Baan psychiatric centre found that the man, who had no previous criminal record, bore only limited responsibility for her death because he suffers from dementia.

At an earlier court sitting, the public prosecutor asked the man be sentenced to the six months he had already served on remand. This would have led to his immediate release.

The court decided to impose the higher sentence of one year to impress upon him that he was the guilty party and not simply a victim who had lost his wife as a result of his condition, news agency Novum reported.

Meanwhile in an unrelated case, a court in Zutphen imposed a 20-year sentence on a 37-year-old man, who murdered his wife and disposed of her body.

Newspaper De Telegraaf reported that the victim’s body was found in a shallow grave in a wood in Putten. She had been stabbed with a sharp object and there were also signs she had been strangled.

The court heard that the couple was divorcing and locked in a custody battle over its three children. The children were put in the woman’s care provisionally and this seems to have led the man to kill her.

Subject: Dutch news