Mother jailed for microwave murder
An American woman convicted of killing her one-month-old daughter in a microwave has been spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Mary Wiseman sentenced China Arnold, 31, of Dayton, Ohio.
Arnold was convicted last week of aggravated murder by the same jury that recommended her punishment after six hours of deliberations.
Prosecutors say Arnold intentionally put 28-day-old Paris Talley in a microwave and turned it on after a fight with her boyfriend. The defence argued that someone else was likely to have been responsible for the baby’s death.
Medical experts testified that the baby died quickly after her temperature reached up to 108 degrees fahrenheit. They said she probably was in the microwave for more than two minutes.
“She died because she was overheated,” said Dr Marcella Fierro, retired chief medical examiner for Virginia. “She was cooked.”
It was Arnold’s third trial over her daughter’s 2005 death. Her first trial ended in a mistrial. She was found guilty in the second, but an appeals court reversed the conviction.
