Maid who stabbed Singapore employer's mum-in-law gets murder charge reduced on provocation appeal

Malay Mail

15-05-2025

SINGAPORE, May 15 — A 24-year-old domestic worker from Myanmar, Zin Mar Nwe, had her murder charge reduced to culpable homicide yesterday after her lawyers successfully argued that she had been provoked when she stabbed her employer's mother-in-law 26 times in 2018.
The Court of Appeal, led by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, accepted the defence's argument that the 70-year-old victim's threat to send the maid back to her agent constituted grave and sudden provocation that caused the then 17-year-old to lose self-control, The Straits Times reported.
Lawyer Josephus Tan argued that the threat carried significant weight as it represented a real possibility of being sent back to Myanmar because it would have been the third time within five months that she had changed employers.
The defence contended that the threat occurred against a backdrop of a period during which the deceased had allegedly 'scolded, hit and hurt the accused,' although prosecutors maintained there was no evidence to support claims of physical abuse beyond the maid's own testimony.
Menon noted in the court's decision that Zin Mar Nwe was young and feared being sent back to her home country in debt, and that a reasonable person in the same situation would have been similarly provoked.
The incident occurred on June 25, 2018, when the two women were alone in the flat, with the maid grabbing a knife from the kitchen and repeatedly stabbing the victim after being threatened with being sent back to the agent.
After the stabbing, Zin Mar Nwe left the flat with some cash, attempted to retrieve her passport from her agency, and then roamed around for five hours before returning to the agency where she was arrested.
The domestic worker had come to Singapore on January 5, 2018, with a falsified passport stating she was 23 years old — the minimum age for working as a domestic worker in Singapore — when she was actually only 17.
During her High Court trial, her previous lawyers had relied on a different partial defence, arguing that she was suffering from a mental condition that diminished her responsibility for her actions, which was rejected by the trial judge.
In Singapore, culpable homicide not amounting to murder is punishable by life imprisonment or for up to 20 years, and the case has been adjourned for parties to prepare sentencing arguments.