A Sydney woman's trauma escaping poverty and war played a role in the violent death of her lover, who she crushed with her vehicle after discovering him with another woman.
Jackline Sabana Bona Musa, 47, has been jailed for a maximum of 20 years after a jury found her guilty of murdering 31-year-old Payman Thagipur with her Toyota Kluger in the car park of his Wentworth Point apartment block.
Feeling cut off from the relationship, Musa sent Mr Thagipur a lengthy text message on June 27, 2020, before searching for him in Granville and then finding him in his underwear with another woman at his home.
The NSW Supreme Court heard she spontaneously formed an intention to seriously injure Mr Thagipur, driving at him with her car, continuing through a bollard while he was pinned to the bonnet, and crushing him against the car park wall.
"His final ordeal was short, but terrifying, and he surely died in enormous pain," Justice Richard Button said on Friday.
"What occurred was a deeply self-centred imposition of violence on a fellow human being."
The judge imposed a head sentence of 20 years for the "fatal explosion of emotion", backdated to Musa's arrest on June 27, 2020.
Her 14-year non-parole period will end in June 2034.
"A life was taken simply because a fellow human being was exercising autonomy in romantic matters, as he was absolutely entitled to do. Deplorable violence was inflicted upon him, whereby he was crushed to death," Justice Button said.
The judge said Musa was living with untreated PTSD, anxiety and depression caused by her experiences fleeing poverty and war in Sudan as a child.
She also felt feelings of worthlessness, never having found happiness in romantic relationships and being poorly treated by at least one ex-partner, he noted.
"I have taken this woman's conditions into account to some degree in mitigation on sentence, not as the slightest excuse for this act of deadly violence, but as some explanation as to why it came to occur," the judge said.
While the tragedy could be described as a "crime of passion", Justice Button said Australian society would see such as term as outdated.
"Modern Australia, I believe, expects a person disappointed and upset by romantic matters to deal with those emotions maturely and certainly without harming others, whether emotionally or physically," he said.
"Australian society and Australian criminal courts firmly condemn domestic violence of any kind, committed by a person of any gender, let alone fatal domestic violence."
He said Musa had shown no remorse or had not even accepted grudging responsibility for what happened.
Justice Button acknowledged Musa had been an upstanding citizen who successfully built a life in Australia prior to the murder, which the judge called "grossly out of character".
"I accept that the incarceration of this previously law-abiding woman of mature years is a source of great shame to her family and herself," he said.
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