SINGAPORE, July 21 — An unemployed man who killed an elderly woman whom he had known for years, after he was caught red-handed stealing her box of jewellery, was sentenced to 18 years’ jail yesterday.

Earlier in May, P. Mageswaran, 50, had been convicted of one count of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, for strangling and suffocating Kanne Lactmy, 62, in her Yishun Street 81 flat in 2013.

Prosecutors had pressed for the maximum sentence of life imprisonment, arguing that the case falls within the range of the "worst type of cases” of culpable homicide.

They also sought an additional six months’ jail since Mageswaran cannot be caned at his age. The age limit for caning is 50.

His lawyers, however, urged the High Court to impose a jail term of between 12 and 14 years, noting that the accused had suffered from mental impairments at the time of the offending act.

In meting out the sentence, Judicial Commissioner Hoo Sheau Peng said that given the substantial length of the term of imprisonment, she saw no reason to add more jail time in lieu of caning.

"This stiff sentence is to punish the accused for a heinous crime in which he has unnecessarily taken away a life, to deter the accused from committing further offences and to serve as general signal that such acts are not to be condoned,” she said.

Mageswaran, who was unemployed and lived in Johor Baru, used to work for Lactmy’s son, and was also invited to their family gatherings.

In need of some money, he travelled to Singapore and arrived at her house in Yishun on the morning of December 9, 2013.

Mageswaran asked to borrow a sum of S$2,000 to S$3,000 (RM6,262 to RM9,393) to pay a RM5,000 instalment payment for his flat, but the elderly woman told him that she did not have that much money.

When she went to the bathroom, he searched the flat and stole a box containing jewellery.

Mageswaran was caught red-handed by Lactmy, who demanded that he return the box.

When he pleaded with her to let him have the box, she threatened to call and inform her son of his act.

Mageswaran pushed the woman to the floor, and pressed a pillow to her face with one hand and choked her with the other.

He then left the flat, taking the box with him, and returned to Johor Baru, where he pawned the jewellery in the box for RM26,300 the next day.

He used the money he had received to pay for his flat, and also spent it on his wife and himself.

Judicial Commissioner Hoo added that the maximum sentence sought by the prosecutors was not warranted as this was not a premeditated offence.

Instead, it was a case of a robbery that had gone "terribly and tragically wrong”.

However, she did agree with the prosecutors that Mageswaran’s long criminal record was cause for concern.

He had committed a series of robberies in 2007 that involved threatening the use of force with choppers, knives and a parang. The judge noted that Mageswaran "had not been deterred by the relatively stiff sentence” of six years’ jail and 24 strokes of the cane.

In this case, he had gone on to "tragically take away a life”, and squandered his ill-gotten gains after he fled the scene, said the judge.

"Due weight must be given to his criminal past, and the propensity to commit offences arising from his financial needs.”

However, Judicial Commissioner Hoo also accepted the defence’s findings that Mageswaran had suffered from mental impairments — namely deficits in problem-solving, inhibition and impulsivity — at the time of the offence.

Noting that the offence had been committed on the spur of the moment, his mental impairments, including low intelligence quotient, also affected his control over his conduct, the judge added. — TODAY