Killed her husband with boiling water after learning he was abusing their children

A mother will spend her whole life in prison: killed her husband with boiling water when their children confessed that the man raped them when they were little.

Although the events took place on July 14, 2020 in Cheshire, a city in Great Britain, the trial was held two weeks ago and the news broke in the last hours: Corinna Smith, 59, will be serving a life sentence.

Smith murdered her husband, Michael Bines, 80, while he was sleeping. For prosecutors in the case, it was a premeditated crime: she took a container, put water to boil and added three sachets of sugar to make a caramel paste and, with this mixture, she went to the room where her husband was and threw the boiling contents on him.

Baines was badly burned and died five weeks later at a local hospital. The sugar “made the liquid more viscous, thick and sticky, so it stayed on the skin and caused more damage,” prosecutors said at the trial.

Smith’s daughter claimed Baines sexually abused her and her brother “for many years as children.” The brother, Craig, committed suicide in 2007 and was jailed for assault.

Smith will serve at least 12 years in prison before he can be considered for parole. The fact that there had been no previous complaints about Baines’ alleged abuse of his children determined that Smith could not prove his claims.

Another point that played against Smith was the fact that she did not assist her husband after throwing boiling water on him. Instead of calling for help, he went from the house to a neighbor’s house, to whom he told what had happened. “I hurt him a lot, I think I killed him”, were his words in front of the neighbor, who called the police urgently.

For local justice, the seriousness of Smith’s charges against her husband could not be proven and, therefore, the appeal was dismissed. Another appeal from Corinna Smith was also rejected in which he said he had been a reckless homicide. Justice was able to verify that the woman took 13 minutes to boil the water to burn her husband, which shows the premeditated plan.

“Throwing boiling water on someone when they are sleeping is absolutely horrible. Mixing three bags of sugar with water also showed their determination to cause serious damage,” said police officer Paul Hughes of Cheshire Criminal Police.

Police found Baines “in excruciating pain, crying in bed with the skin on his right arm and his hand peeled off,” according to the court record.

Public opinion was sharply divided on the case, among those who felt that Smith had no choice but to kill her husband upon learning that he was abusing her children and others who saw her as a murderer of cold blood.

The case of Valérie Bacot

The case of Corinna Smith reminds us of Valérie Bacot, a French woman who was sentenced to life in prison for killing her husband with a bullet in the head in 2016, who abused and sexually assaulted her all her life. The woman was given a light sentence and was not detained.

The sentence handed down will prevent him from returning to prison, since the judgment imposes four years in prison, including a single sign, time that Bacot has already served during his preventive detention. The sentence thus follows the recommendations of the prosecution itself, which had asked for “leniency” for a woman who risked life imprisonment, but who was “clearly a victim” and not a murderer, as her final plea underlined.

“You can leave this courtroom free”, the president of the tribunal, Céline Therme, told Bacot, to the applause of the public. The cheering continued as Bacot, backed by his lawyers, walked out of court. A petition not to return this woman to prison had received more than half a million signatures before the hearings began.

Bacot has been abused by Daniel Polette since the age of 12 and the man dated his mother. In 95 the man fell in prison but on his release he returned to the family home worse than before: “Everything started again as before.

She was raped at the age of 12 by her stepfather, who later became her husband, beaten and also forced into prostitution. Valérie Bacot becomes the new symbol of domestic violence in France.

Like the British case of Corinna Smith, sYour case has also divided public opinion The French as well as the political class, among those who believe that the now accused is guilty of a crime and those who consider her as a victim, the majority position.