State Prosecutor Judge Samir Hammoud appealed Monday a decision issued by Beirut’s Criminal Court on July 14, 2016, which consists in reducing the sentence of Mohammad Nouheili, who bludgeoned his wife Manal Assi to death with a pressure cooker in 2014.
In July, the Judge presiding over Beirut’s Criminal Court, Helene Iskandar, granted Assi’s husband a mitigating excuse and reduced his sentence from death penalty to five years in prison, including the period of his detention, after considering that the killer was in a state of rage when he committed the crime.
The sentence was based on Article 252 of Lebanon's Penal Code, which allows for reduced punishment if a crime occurred as a result of extreme rage caused by “dangerous and wrongful action committed by the victim.”
Jude Hammoud saw the decision to reduce Nouheili’s sentence from the death penalty to five years in prison "a mistake in explaining and implementing Article 252 of the Penal Code."
In making his case, Hammoud pointed out that intentional murder shall be punished by death penalty in accordance with the Article 549, paragraph 4 of the Penal Code.
He also noted that Article 189 says that an offense may be deemed intentional even if the perpetrator did not mean to kill as long as he/she had foreseen the possibility of death and thus accepted the risk.
Last week, activists and human rights groups staged a protest outside Beirut’s Justice Palace in Adlieh to denounce Nouheili's sentence reduction.
Lebanese citizen Manal Assi, 33, was one of the victims of domestic violence.
She was cruelly tortured by her husband for more than 2 hours before he took her to al-Maqased Hospital where she died of her wounds on February 5, 2014.
Two months later, an indictment was issued against her husband Mohammad Nouheili, convicting him of murder and sentencing him to death.
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