A Turkish judge has given a man who tracked down his young wife and blasted her to death at her parents’ home with a pump-action shotgun a lower sentence for “good behaviour”.
The young woman’s furious family says they are already planning to appeal the verdict after the judge rejected the prosecutor’s demands for a heavier sentence at the end of the trial of Soner Yanikoglu, 22, who was convicted of killing his wife Emine Yanikoglu, 20, with a pump-action shotgun.
It means he will serve 24 years in prison instead of a minimum of 30, leaving the victim’s family devastated.
The young woman had married Soner at the age of 17, despite her family being opposed to it, and her husband began beating her and trying to control her, after which she fled back to her parents’ house.
On the day of the murder, Soner went to his father-in-law’s house in a bid to convince his wife to go back with him on Friday, 30th July, last year.
But she refused and asked him to bring her belongings to her father’s home. But instead of bringing her belongings, it was a pump-action shotgun that he pulled out of a bag in front of the unsuspecting woman.
He shot her dead with the weapon before being arrested by police, and as a result of being a model prisoner, the aggravated life sentence that he faced was reduced to a ‘regular’ life sentence.
A life sentence in Turkey is 24 years in prison, whereas an aggravated life sentence is what was introduced to replace the death penalty.
Prisoners sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment can only be paroled after serving at least 30 years, or 36 years if given more than one sentence.
The trial during which this decision was made by the judge took place at the 37th High Criminal Court in the Turkish capital Ankara, in the heart of the country, in central Anatolia.
The ‘good conduct discount’, applied in this case, is at the discretion of the judge.
Also known as ‘reputation discount’, the defendant’s background and how he or she acted after the crime was committed and during the trial are all taken into account for the time that can be taken off a defendant’s sentence.
So a defendant who has been given an aggravated life sentence may see that sentence reduced after the good conduct discount is applied.
Critics argue that the so-called good conduct discount is why femicide is a growing problem in Turkey, particularly after the country officially quit the Istanbul Convention in July last year.
According to the 2021 Annual Data Report announced by the ‘We Will Stop Femicide Platform’, 280 women were killed by men in 2021, while 217 women were found suspiciously dead.
According to data from the ‘Monument Counter’, which is a monument established on the Internet to keep alive the memory of the women who have died due to violence against women in Turkey and which is updated every day, 73 femicides have taken place since the beginning of 2022.
