SINGAPORE: A man who beat his five-year-old daughter to death had his sentence increased to life imprisonment on Friday (Jul 11) after failing in an appeal to reduce his 35-year jail term.
The victim, Ayeesha, died of a head injury in 2017 after her father repeatedly smacked her in the toilet where she and her brother were confined.
Her death was preceded by almost two years of abuse and neglect, which included her not having enough to eat and being kept naked in the toilet for nearly 10 months.
The man, 45, cannot be named to protect the identity of his son. A judge previously allowed Ayeesha to be named “so that society may remember her”.
The offender had pleaded guilty to six charges in the case: one count of culpable homicide, four counts of child abuse and one count of disposing of evidence.
Twenty more charges of child abuse and lying to police officers were considered in sentencing.
He originally received a sentence of 34-and-a-half years’ jail and 12 strokes of the cane. He was given an additional six months’ jail after being found unfit for caning due to a degenerative disc disease and disc compression.
On Friday, the man’s lawyers, Mr Mervyn Cheong and Ms Lim Yi Zheng of Advocatus Law, appealed for a shorter sentence of 25-and-a-half to 30 years’ imprisonment.
The prosecution did not appeal for a heavier punishment. However, the Court of Appeal exercised its discretion to increase the man’s jail sentence for the culpable homicide charge from 15 years to life imprisonment.
The three judges on the bench were Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, Justice Steven Chong and Justice Judith Prakash.
They heard arguments on whether or not the man’s actions placed this among the worst cases of culpable homicide in Singapore.
Deputy Public Prosecutors James Chew and Maximilian Chew argued that life imprisonment would not be disproportionate to the man’s culpability and the gravity of his offence.
They said his offence warranted a sentence at the high end of the sentencing range for culpable homicide not amounting to murder, which is punishable with life imprisonment or jail for up to 20 years with a fine and caning.
The prosecutors pointed to the prolonged period of abuse and neglect that Ayeesha suffered, and the heinous and unprovoked attack by the man against his biological daughter.
They said “the full extent of the cruelty perpetrated against Ayeesha” could only be understood by considering all the offending actions collectively.
Starting in 2015, she was not given enough food and resorted to eating her own faeces out of hunger. She was severely undernourished, weighing just 13.2kg when she died. She had been kept in “inhumane conditions” since February 2016.
“Seen in this context, the extreme physical, emotional and psychological suffering that the five-year-old girl had to endure in the period leading to, and during the fatal attack, was truly horrific and difficult to imagine,” said the prosecutors.
Arguing that this was not one of the worst cases of culpable homicide, Mr Cheong and Ms Lim said that the 15-year jail term already took into account all the relevant sentencing factors, and that their client had shown genuine remorse.
Ayeesha and her brother were initially in foster care but returned to live with their father and his second wife in early 2015.
They did not attend any school from May 2015, and were not seen by any social service case officers from around that time.
Their father would often lie to social service officers that the children were staying with his relatives.
The man, who was trained in martial arts, physically abused the children. He and his wife started confining them between a bookshelf and a wardrobe in February 2016.
In October 2016, they moved the children to the kitchen toilet, only letting them out to be fed or when the couple wanted to use the toilet.
On the night of Aug 10, 2017, Ayeesha and her brother were sleeping in the toilet when their stepmother asked them to move their legs as they had not been active the whole day.
When Ayeesha did not listen, her stepmother complained to her father, who smacked her face 15 to 20 times before leaving her in the toilet.
The next evening, the family realised Ayeesha had died.
The man then went about covering his tracks. This included the disposal of a closed-circuit television camera and other evidence.
He brought his son and Ayeesha’s body to the hospital on the morning of Aug 12, 2017, and the man was arrested that afternoon.
Ayeesha’s stepmother faces four charges of ill-treating Ayeesha and her brother and two charges of giving false information to a police officer.
The 34-year-old woman’s case is still before the courts, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for Jul 15.
