The mastermind of two failed murder attempts on her boyfriend got another sentence reduction by the Supreme Court on Friday — now down from an initial life sentence to seven years in prison.
Sok Kimly was convicted for attempting to murder her boyfriend in 2015 in an incident involving a gun, and in 2016 in a hired grenade attack. The attempted killings were spurred by Kimly’s jealousy over her boyfriend’s outside relations and night out.
A Phnom Penh Court convicted her in both cases and sentenced her to life in prison for the grenade case, before the Appeal Court lowered the sentences to 30 years. The Supreme Court in October 2021 then dropped the 2015 assassination case but sent the grenade attack back to the Appeal Court for retrial, and her sentence fell to 15 years in May.
Two months later, on Friday morning, presiding judge Nil Nonn said he had accepted parts of her appeal of that 15-year sentence, without elaborating, and further reduced it to seven years in prison.
Kimly did not appear at the court this morning.
Defense lawyer Yon Bunna said after the decision that he was happy with the sentence reduction as his client had no intention to kill her boyfriend. During court hearings, the defense has argued that she only wanted to scare her boyfriend.
“I congratulate her. I tried hard to defend her through legal means,” Bunna said, noting how the boyfriend had lived, and there was “no damage.”
Four people were injured and three cars damaged in the grenade blast.
Sek Sophorn, a lawyer who was not involved in the case, and Licadho spokesman Am Sam Ath said they had each seen just one prior case that had bounced around the different levels of the judiciary in a similar way, but in general the law allowed for such procedures.
