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Showing Original Post only (View all)(Sweden) Court slashes sentence in 'honour killing' case (from 8 yrs to 4) [View all]
Court slashes sentence in 'honour killing' case
A Swedish appeals court has reduced a lower court's eight-year prison sentence for a 17-year-old boy found of guilty fatally stabbing his sister more than 100 times after she fled a forced marriage in Iraq, in what the court referred to as an "honour killing".
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, the Malmö Court of Appeals (Hövrätten), upheld the teen's guilty verdict, but discarded the lower court's eight-year prison sentence.
The court instead sentenced the boy to four years in juvenile detention because he was 16 when he killed his sister.
As the boy was only days away from his 17th birthday at the time of the attack, the lower court had decided to punish him as a 17-year-old rather than as a 16-year-old, allowing for a longer prison sentence.
The appeals court verdict stated that had the the crime been committed by an adult, it would have warranted a sentence of life in prison.
http://www.thelocal.se/47758/20130507/#.UYmywEr4KSo