SINGAPORE: A man who fractured his wife’s nose and rib in separate arguments linked to his affair was sentenced on Thursday (Mar 26) to 11 months’ jail and one stroke of the cane.
The 45-year-old Singaporean man pleaded guilty to two counts of voluntarily causing grievous hurt.
Another four charges, including harassment and voluntarily causing hurt, were taken into consideration.
Both parties cannot be named due to gag orders on their identities.
THE CASE
At the time of the offences, the accused was married to a 33-year-old woman. They lived together in a house with their three children.
On Dec 11, 2018, the man returned home drunk in the wee hours and asked her why she had not attended a family event.
His wife was angry at him because she had just found out that he was having an affair.
The argument turned physical and the woman tried to defend herself and hold on to her husband.
The accused swung his leg up and struck his wife’s nose with his knee, causing it to bleed and swell.
As his wife was a nurse, she could stop the bleeding on her own. She went to a hospital where she was attended to at about 1am.
She initially told the doctor that she had hit her nose against a door, as her sister-in-law had instructed her to say she had hurt her nose in a fall “so as not to make things worse”.
The attending doctor did not believe her and the woman eventually told him that she had gotten into a fight with her husband.
The doctor advised her to lodge a police report, but she declined at the time.
She was diagnosed with a nasal bone fracture and given outpatient leave along with a follow-up appointment. When she visited a specialist outpatient clinic at the hospital on Dec 31, 2018, she reported that her nose had changed shape and felt “shaky”.
