Kiryat Motzkin man gets 20 yrs for murdering pregnant wife

Judges agree to lesser sentence under plea bargain.

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
Inbal Chen 311 (photo credit: courtesy)
Inbal Chen 311
(photo credit: courtesy)
Judges in the Haifa District Court on Thursday sentenced a Kiryat Motzkin resident to 20 years in prison for the murder of his wife.
David Chen, 35, was found guilty of stabbing his wife, Inbal, to death in April, before attempting suicide. Inbal Chen was pregnant with her first child at the time of her murder.
Although the penalty for murder is life in prison, Judges Yosef Elron, Moshe Gilad and Menahem Raniel accepted the lesser sentence as part of a plea bargain, after the prosecution and defense agreed Chen was suffering from a severe depressive disorder at the time of the murder that impaired his ability to understand and anticipate the consequences of his actions.
In one psychiatric report filed for the defense, Prof. Shmuel Tiano said that Chen “intended to end the lives of both members of the couple, at a time when he had neither the social judgement or the emotional strength to refrain from so doing.”
Chen was offered the chance to make a statement to the court before the judges made their decision to accept the plea bargain. However, he only wept and said he could not speak.
“This is another of those cases, all too frequent cases at this time, in which an innocent young woman’s life is taken, murdered for no reason by someone she thought would be her partner for life,” said Elron, ruling to accept the plea bargain with its lenient sentence.
The court also ordered Chen to pay his wife’s family compensation of NIS 50,000.
According to the indictment, on the morning of the murder, Chen and his wife had begun to argue over the fact that Chen had stopped working a few months earlier.
During the fight, Chen’s wife told him that if the situation continued, she would leave him.
The indictment charges that at this point Chen decided to kill his wife.
Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, Chen stabbed his wife three times, in the stomach, back and under her chin.
She died at the scene.
Chen then wrote a suicide note, before telephoning his brother and confessing to him that he had murdered his wife. Afterward, he swallowed sleeping pills and lay down on the floor beside his wife’s body.