Despite his wife's desperate pleas, the husband who killed his two young children could not escape the death penalty.
Despite the wife's earnest pleas for leniency for her husband who poisoned their two young children with pesticide, the appellate court upheld the death sentence.
The trial was opened to consider the defendant's appeal for a reduced sentence. The mother of the two unfortunate children, Nguyen Thi Hien (born in 1989), filed an appeal requesting a lighter sentence for her husband.
|
| Defendant Nguyen Van Duy. |
In her appeal, Ms. Hien wrote: "I earnestly and respectfully request the appellate court to consider mitigating circumstances for the defendant Nguyen Van Duy, so that he may have a chance to live, and consider this as all I can do to atone for my sins before myself and my family."
According to the initial verdict, in 2008, Duy married Ms. Hien, but they had no children for many years. After a period of treatment, Ms. Hien gave birth to two children, a boy and a girl.
In April 2018, Duy suspected his wife was having an affair with another man. He also suspected that the two children his wife had given birth to were not his.
Duy repeatedly questioned his wife about this, but Hien denied it, leading to frequent arguments and physical altercations between them.
Outraged by the assault, Ms. Hien returned to her parents' home. During this time, she repeatedly contacted her husband via text messages and phone calls to inform him of her intention to divorce him.
As for Duy, after accumulating doubts and facing criticism about the two children not resembling him, he took samples of their hair for testing. The results showed that he was not the biological father of the two children.
In his desperation, Duy conceived the idea of killing his two young children to make his wife regret her actions. At approximately 12:30 PM on May 18, 2018, the defendant purchased pesticide and stored it in the kitchen.
The next morning, he wrote a suicide note and then went to the daycare to pick up his two children and take them home.
Duy mixed pesticide into soft drinks and gave them to his children to drink. As for himself, the defendant mixed pesticide into water and drank it before lying down in bed next to his children.
Around 11 a.m. that same day, Duy felt unwell and started vomiting. He thought that vomiting wouldn't kill him, so he went up to the third floor and jumped to his death.
Thanks to timely medical intervention, Duy survived, but the two children died from pesticide poisoning.
Considering it necessary to remove the defendant from society, the appellate court decided to uphold the death sentence for Nguyen Van Duy.