ONTARIO
SUPERIOR COURT OF JUSTICE
COURT FILE NO.: 70000180/13
DATE: 20140610
BETWEEN:
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN
– and –
KADARA TOKHI
Defendant
Barbara Lynch, for the Crown
John Collins, for the Defendant
HEARD: April 3 and 23, 2014
molloy j.:
REASONS FOR SENTENCE
Introduction
[1] I convicted Kadara Tokhi of hiring someone to murder her husband.[^1] It is now my task to impose sentence for that crime.
[2] The Crown seeks a term of imprisonment of three to four years. Defence counsel urges me to “temper justice with as much mercy and clemency as can be found in the record” and to impose a sentence that will not have crushing consequences for Mrs. Tokhi’s rehabilitation. He suggests keeping her in the provincial reformatory system with a sentence of two years less a day, or failing that, a sentence at the lower end for a penitentiary term.
[3] In my view, the sentence suggested by the Crown already reflects compassion for Mrs. Tokhi’s circumstances. For the reasons that follow, I am imposing a sentence of three and one-half years.
General Principles
[4] The determination of a fit sentence for any crime is more art than science. There are some general principles of sentencing to provide guidance, but fashioning a sentence that meets all of the objectives of sentencing is never an easy task. This case is a particularly difficult one.
[5] As a matter of general principle, I must consider the importance of denunciation and deterrence, particularly in a crime of this nature that could easily have resulted in the death of another human being. I must also take into account the circumstances of the offence and of the offender, and the degree of the offender’s moral blameworthiness. The prospects of rehabilitation are also important, particularly for a person, such as Mrs. Tokhi, with no prior criminal record. In considering the appropriate sentence I must weigh the aggravating and mitigating factors and impose a sentence that would be generally comparable to what a similar offender would receive for a similar offence. Sometimes the protection of the public and the need to separate an offender from the community can be factors, but I do not consider either of these to be relevant in this case. A sentence must be imposed that appropriately reflects all of these factors and at the same time is the least restrictive option that does reflect those principles.[^2]
[6] Aggravating factors must be proven by the Crown beyond a reasonable doubt. The defence bears the onus of establishing any mitigating factors relied upon, but only on the balance of probabilities standard.
Circumstances of the Offence
[7] The hit man that Mrs. Tokhi hired to kill her husband was actually an undercover police officer, D.C. Dharmendra Grewal. Mrs. Tokhi gave D.C. Grewal very clear instructions about carrying out this task. She agreed on a price, gave information about her husband’s habits so that he could be tracked, provided a photograph to assist in identifying him, and paid a deposit. When asked if she wanted her husband stabbed or shot, she instructed the undercover officer to shoot him. Officer Grewal was careful to ensure that Mrs. Tokhi understood how final such an action would be, but she was adamant that she wanted him to proceed. She expressed her concern about ensuring that the job was carried out and told the undercover officer that another person she had paid to kill her husband had reported to her that he had thrown Mr. Tokhi off a bridge to his death, but that Mr. Tokhi came home from work as usual that same day. She suggested that the murder be carried out in the parking lot of her apartment building where she would be able to see the police arrive. When Officer Grewal protested that this was not a good location, she suggested that he take a picture of the dead body and then erase it after she had seen it. In his first face-to-face meeting with Mrs. Tokhi, Officer Grewal gave her his cell phone number and urged her to call him if she changed her mind. She continued to insist that he proceed and confirmed that intent at their second face-to-face meeting, at the conclusion of which she was arrested.
Circumstances of the Offender
[8] Kadara Tokhi is a 47-year-old first offender. She was born in Afghanistan in 1967 and at the age of 14 entered into an arranged marriage with Ali Amad Tokhi, the intended victim of this offence. Their first child, a son, was born in Afghanistan. Mrs. Tokhi testified at the sentencing hearing that this son was born in the same year as the marriage and that she was still only 14 years old at the time. However, according to the pre-sentence report (“PSR”), the first child was born when Mrs. Tokhi was 16.
[9] According to both the PSR and Mrs. Tokhi’s testimony, she and her husband and baby fled Afghanistan in 1980 and entered Pakistan as refugees, where they remained for about five years. A second child, also a son, was born in Pakistan. The family then moved to India, where they lived for about six years. A third child, this time a daughter, was born in India. The family then emigrated to Canada in 1991, living first in Montreal and moving to Toronto in 1993. A fourth child, another son, was born in Canada.
[10] Many of the dates provided by Mrs. Tokhi are contradictory. Mrs. Tokhi does not appear to have a firm grasp of the dates upon which things happened nor the ages of the people involved at the time of key events. I had the same difficulty with the evidence of Mr. Tokhi at trial. I suspect cultural issues may explain this. However, for purposes of this sentencing, it is clear that Mrs. Tokhi has been married since she was around 14 or 15 years old and is now either 47 or perhaps a year or two older than that. She has four children – three boys and one girl – all of whom are now adults. The two youngest children were still living with Mrs. Tokhi at the time of trial.
[11] Mrs. Tokhi has never attended school and cannot read or write in any language. She has never had a job outside the home. When interviewed for the pre-sentence report, all of Mrs. Tokhi’s children and also her husband described her as being a devoted mother.
[12] Mr. Tokhi and the oldest son of the family (who is clearly allied with his father) maintained that Mrs. Tokhi is irrationally emotional in her love for her younger brother and has been “brainwashed” by him.
[13] It is apparent that this is a household dictated by traditional male Afghan views as to the role of the wife and mother. Mr. Tokhi testified at trial that his wife rarely left the house except to shop. He described his wife to the author of the PSR as being “plain paper, you can write whatever you want on it.”
Motive for the Offence
[14] I do not know why Mrs. Tokhi wanted to cause her husband’s death. She did not testify at trial. Although she did testify at the sentencing hearing, she denied having hired the undercover officer to kill her husband. I am therefore left in the dark as to her motive.
[15] Mrs. Tokhi’s husband testified at trial and said he could think of no reason why his wife would want to kill him. He denied ever assaulting his wife. He said he thought they had a good marriage. Mr. Tokhi was asked at trial about a large sum of money that he kept in his Regent Park apartment rather than in a bank. He confirmed that he had $75,000 in cash, which he said he had received from the sale of a store he owned in his home country. According to Mr. Tokhi, this money was concealed inside a wall of his house and was stolen by someone in his family. He initially blamed his wife. Later he blamed his wife’s brother, apparently because she told him her brother took it. However, when he confronted the brother, he denied taking it and Mrs. Tokhi admitted that he had not. In my Reasons for convicting Mrs. Tokhi I noted:[^3]
I do not pretend to have any insight into this issue. It may or may not have some bearing on Mrs. Tokhi’s desire to kill her husband. The only thing about which I am confident is that I have not heard the whole truth about it. It is not safe to rely on Mr. Tokhi’s evidence in relation to this money. I have disregarded it entirely in my analysis.
The Pre-Sentence Report
[16] Prior to sentencing, I requested a pre-sentence report. The report, authored by Muhammad Malik, is dated March 27, 2014 and was delivered just prior to April 3, 2014, which was the original date set for sentencing. In that report, Mr. Malik detailed numerous allegations made to him by Mrs. Tokhi about the conduct of her husband and of her younger brother, including the following:
(a) Her brother raped her daughter in Afghanistan in 2001 when the daughter was only 12 years old.
(b) Her brother raped her daughter four more times in Toronto between 2008 and 2010.
(c) Over the objections of Mrs. Tokhi, her husband forced their daughter to marry his nephew who lived in Texas when the daughter was only 15 years old. The wedding took place in Toronto under Sharia law.
(d) In fact the nephew in Texas was already legally married there and had children with his Texan wife.
(e) When the daughter left the marriage and returned to Toronto several years later, Mrs. Tokhi’s husband accused her of shaming the family and verbally and physically abused her.
(f) After having taken a sleeping pill, Mrs. Tokhi “unintentionally” told her brother where her husband had hidden approximately $70,000 inside the wall of their home. Her brother returned while she was out and stole the money.
(g) When her husband discovered the money was missing, she told him her brother had taken it. Her husband threatened to divorce her if she did not get the money back.
(h) Her brother refused to return the money and told her that she should kill her husband. He threatened to kill her son if she did not kill her husband. He also threatened to kill her son if she called the police.
[17] In light of these allegations, I adjourned the sentencing so that Mr. Collins could take steps to have the PSR translated for his client and obtain her instructions. I left open the possibility of a motion to reopen the trial based on this evidence, which could potentially give rise to a defence of duress (without ruling on the likelihood of success for that defence), as well as the possibility that some of this information might prove to be a mitigating factor on sentence. However, given the nature of the allegations, I advised the defence that I would not be accepting the PSR as proving any of these facts. If these allegations were to be relied upon, they would need to be the subject of viva voce evidence at the sentencing hearing.
[18] Prior to the next return date, Mr. Collins delivered a notice of application to reopen the trial to raise the defence of duress. Upon the return date, Mr. Collins advised that the PSR had been reviewed by Mrs. Tokhi and she had confirmed that the contents were true. The defence proposed that the initial findings I had made with respect to Mrs. Tokhi having arranged for a contract killing would be left undisturbed, but that viva voce evidence would be called to support the defence of duress. The Crown opposed the application to reopen, primarily on the grounds that it was based on evidence available at the time of trial. I deferred making any determination as to whether to reopen the trial to admit this evidence. Even if the defence of duress was not available, the evidence could be called as a mitigating factor on sentencing. Therefore, I ruled that I would first hear the evidence and later hear submissions as to the manner in which it could be used.
[19] Mrs. Tokhi then took the stand as a witness. In her evidence, she confirmed many of the details set out in the PSR with respect to her background. She also confirmed the substance of the particulars in the PSR relating to her daughter’s marriage. With respect to her brother’s alleged rapes of her daughter, she testified that she believed these had occurred. However, some of the details, including dates, were different. On the crucial point of her brother having instructed her to kill her husband and his threat to kill her son if she did not follow those instructions, Mrs. Tokhi denied having said this to Mr. Malik. She also maintained that she had never hired the undercover officer to murder anyone.
[20] At the completion of Mrs. Tokhi’s evidence, Mr. Collins conceded that there was no evidentiary basis to reopen the trial. In sentencing submissions, he argued that although Mrs. Tokhi did not repeat the statements attributed to her by Mr. Malik in the PSR, I could probably accept that she had said those things. He pointed out that there are likely family and cultural issues at play and that I do not have the whole story. He raised the possibility that Mrs. Tokhi had recanted for fear of reprisals.
[21] The Crown’s position is that I cannot rely on anything contentious in the pre-sentence report.
[22] I tend to agree with both counsel. The pre-sentence report is very thorough and carefully done. I do not think Mr. Malik made up these allegations, nor do I believe that he could simply be mistaken about the thrust of what Mrs. Tokhi told him. I have no difficulty accepting that the PSR is an accurate reflection of what Mrs. Tokhi told Mr. Malik at the time. On this point, I agree with Mr. Collins. However, I also agree with Crown counsel, Ms. Lynch, that it is not possible to rely upon what is said in the pre-sentence report. Mrs. Tokhi has given conflicting versions of what happened. I have no way of sorting out what is true and what is not. In particular, I have no basis for rejecting the sworn evidence given by Mrs. Tokhi at trial in favour of her unsworn statements to Mr. Malik. On the evidence before me, it would be speculative to find that Mrs. Tokhi’s motivation for this offence was related in any way to fear of what her brother might do. Indeed, I am not even satisfied on a balance of probabilities that it was the brother who took the money. There is only Mrs. Tokhi’s word for that and she is a wholly unreliable witness. If Mrs. Tokhi acted as she did in hiring a hitman because of threats made by her brother, that could be a mitigating factor in sentencing. However, the onus is on the defence to establish this on a balance of probabilities. That standard has not been met.
Allegations of Assault
[23] In the PSR, Mrs. Tokhi is reported as having said that her husband assaulted her “several times” during their marriage, but that she never reported it to the authorities because it was socially unacceptable in her community for Afghan women to make such complaints. Mr. Tokhi denied any incidents of domestic violence, both to the author of the PSR and in his evidence at trial.
[24] In her testimony at the sentencing hearing, Mrs. Tokhi testified that her relationship with her husband has been one of “fighting and commotion, day in and day out.” She said that he beat her every day. In her examination in chief, she also said that while in Canada her husband had stabbed her with knives and assaulted her with a thermos of hot liquid, and that while in Afghanistan he had applied electric shock to her. Under cross-examination, she denied that her husband stabbed her and said that he had slapped her and kicked her while in Canada, and that while in Afghanistan, he beat her with a belt. She acknowledged that she did not sustain any injuries from any of these assaults that took place in Canada. When pressed about the thermos of hot liquid, she said she had moved when it was thrown so it did not hit any part of her body. Likewise, she said that her husband had thrown a container of sweets at her, but that did not hit her either. According to Mrs. Tokhi, none of these assaults were ever witnessed by anyone else, including by the children who lived in the same house. She did not tell the police, nor did she tell her own doctor, stating that it was not their custom to tell anyone about these sorts of things.
[25] I have no doubt that Mr. Tokhi may have been domineering. He may even have displayed some violence towards his wife. However, I have difficulty believing that this went on every single day without anybody every seeing it and without there ever being a single injury. I believe Mrs. Tokhi has exaggerated, or perhaps even invented, the degree of abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband. I find that Mrs. Tokhi is a person who does not feel constrained to tell the truth merely because she is testifying in a court of law. It is not safe to rely on her word for anything. It may or may not be true. I am unable to take this into account as a mitigating factor in sentencing.
Mitigating Factors
[26] The strongest factor in Mrs. Tokhi’s favour is that she is a first-time offender. This crime does appear to be out of character for her. Apart from her eldest son who appears to have sided with her husband, Mrs. Tokhi enjoys the support and love of her children.
[27] Mr. Collins submits that Mrs. Tokhi is naïve and unsophisticated. I agree. However, I do not see this as a mitigating factor. She had a full appreciation of what she was doing and the consequences of it. She was naïve only in the execution of her plan, and even in that respect she was able to go out on the streets and negotiate a murder for hire contract. Her lack of sophistication means only that she was not ultimately successful in carrying out her plan. It does nothing to excuse or explain her conduct.
[28] I also recognize, however, that Mrs. Tokhi has not had an easy life. That is a mitigating factor. Her limited education and subjugation to the will of her husband did not equip her well to deal with problems as they arose, or to move beyond the cultural norms in which she was raised, in order to seek help for herself. I also recognize that there have been deep divisions between Mrs. Tokhi and her husband with respect to the forced marriage of their daughter at the age of 15 (a marriage which in fact would not be legal under Canadian law and was opposed by Mrs. Tokhi), as well as discord between them relating to Mr. Tokhi’s reaction to their daughter abandoning that marriage.
[29] I do not find Mrs. Tokhi to be particularly remorseful, notwithstanding the observations of Mr. Malik in the PSR. When I asked Mrs. Tokhi if she had anything to say before I imposed sentence, she said “I want to offer my sincere apology. It will never happen again in my life.” It is difficult to square this with her evidence at the sentencing hearing and her conduct with the undercover officer. I note that this is not an aggravating factor; it is merely the absence of a mitigating factor. However, it does serve to distinguish this case from some other sentencing decisions where genuine remorse was present.
[30] If I had been satisfied that there was a history of violence in the home, I would have considered this to be a mitigating factor. However, the burden is on Mrs. Tokhi to establish this. There is nothing at all to corroborate her evidence. She was not entirely truthful with the court. I am not satisfied on the balance of probabilities that there was a history of domestic violence against Mrs. Tokhi by her husband. That might be the case, but it is not a safe finding on the evidence before me.
Aggravating Factors
[31] Mrs. Tokhi told D.C. Grewal that she had attempted to hire others to kill her husband, but that they had taken her money without following through on the murder. There is some confirmation of this in the evidence at trial. On one occasion when Mrs. Tokhi failed to attend for an arranged meeting with D.C. Grewal, she told him that she had run into a guy she had previously paid money to and had to deal with his demand for additional money. At the particular time in question, she was under surveillance and was seen walking and talking with an unknown man.
[32] Further, the reason the undercover officer was introduced in the first place was because the police received information from Trevor Letlow that he had been hired by a woman who was trying to have somebody murdered or severely injured. Mr. Letlow gave the police the name he had used in dealing with this woman (“Salem”) and two telephone numbers with which to contact her. When D.C. Grewal called those numbers, he made contact with Mrs. Tokhi. He told her that he had obtained her name from Salem and that he understood she had a problem. Thereafter, Mrs. Tokhi met with D.C. Grewal and entered into a contract to pay him to murder her husband.
[33] Trevor Letlow did not testify at trial. He was in custody for an unrelated matter when he provided this information to the police and he has a long criminal record, including many convictions for crimes of dishonesty. However, the information he provided did prove to be correct – Mrs. Tokhi was attempting to hire a hit man. This provides substantial corroboration for his story.
[34] Based on the evidence at trial, I am satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Tokhi’s discussions with the undercover officer in this case were not the first occasion on which she attempted to hire someone to kill her husband. I put it no higher than that, but it is nevertheless an aggravating factor.
[35] Further, at the conclusion of her negotiations with D.C. Grewal for the murder of her husband, Mrs. Tokhi told him that at the conclusion of this job, she had another prospective job for him – the murder of her brother.
[36] Throughout her negotiations with the undercover officer, Mrs. Tokhi did not appear to be frightened or desperate. On the contrary, she appeared to be calm and organized and at times smiled and appeared quite happy at the prospect of the upcoming killing. I find this lack of empathy to be chilling.
Parity in Sentencing
[37] Generally speaking, similar offenders should be given similar sentences for crimes committed in similar circumstances. However, this is a concept that is particularly difficult to apply in this case. The circumstances of this case are sufficiently bizarre that it is hard to find similar cases to which it can be compared.
[38] If Mrs. Tokhi had been successful in her concerted attempt to hire someone to kill her husband, she would have been guilty of first degree murder, with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment and no eligibility for parole for 25 years. The fact that she has escaped that fate is not due to anything attributable to her, but only due to the fact that the person she believed to be a murderer was in fact a police officer. Understandably, hiring someone to commit murder, when the murder does not actually occur, is treated as being akin to attempted murder for purposes of sentencing.[^4] The maximum sentence is life imprisonment; there is no minimum. Because the offence can be committed in a vast spectrum of circumstances, there is a correspondingly wide range in sentencing.[^5] However, the general range for cases of this nature would appear to be between three and eight years.
[39] In R. v. Dos Santos,[^6] Hill J. dealt with a somewhat similar situation in which a woman hired someone (who turned out to be an undercover police officer) to kill her husband. She was in a dispute with her husband with respect to the custody of their two children. Although the crime “was the product of cold calculation and considerable planning and deliberation” it was committed at a time of extreme stress. The offender had no criminal record, pleaded guilty, and expressed remorse. As a result of the offence and her incarceration, she would also suffer further separation from her children. In these circumstances, Hill J. found that the fit range for sentence was five to six years and sentenced Ms Dos Santos to four and one-half years on top of time already served, reasoning that this was the equivalent of a sentence approaching five and one-half years. Mrs. Tokhi does not have the benefit of the mitigating effect of a guilty plea and remorse, but she does have the mitigating effect of her difficult personal background and circumstances. For purposes of comparison, she would be in a similar range.
[40] The decision of Weinper J. in R. v. Cozzi,[^7] is also useful for purposes of comparison. Mrs. Cozzi was embroiled in matrimonial proceedings with her husband, including a dispute over custody of their four children aged 13, 12, 9 and 7. She had a long history of depression, including several suicide attempts. She hired two men she believed to be bikers to kill her husband. They turned out to be police officers working undercover. The trial judge imposed a sentence of three years, largely because of two significant mitigating factors: (1) the influence of and abuse by her boyfriend who had connections to Satan’s Choice and who the trial judge described as being “discreditable” and “unsavoury;” and (2) the impact a longer sentence would have on the four children who were very devoted to their mother. But for these factors, the trial judge found that he “could easily have imposed a sentence of five to six years.” Again, this is a situation in which the mitigating factors reducing Mrs. Cozzi’s sentence are not present in Mrs. Tokhi’s case, but where Mrs. Cozzi does not come from the same history of deprivation and disadvantage as does Mrs. Tokhi.
[41] In a similar case, R. v. T.K., Lebel J. sentenced a 28-year-old woman to the equivalent of four years for hiring someone to murder her former common law spouse and father of her five-year-old twin daughters. Again, there were some issues with respect to a custody dispute. Also there was some influence from T.K’s current spouse, a man who was serving a life sentence for second degree murder at the time she married him (which was within months of when she started her attempts to find a hit man to kill her former spouse). T.K. pleaded guilty and showed remorse. These mitigating factors led the trial judge to reduce the sentence from an applicable range of five to six years to the four year sentence he imposed (two years on top of two years credit for pre-trial custody).
[42] R. v. Cheema[^8] is a decision of the British Columbia Supreme Court. This is another example of an ex-wife attempting to arrange the murder of her husband because of issues involving the custody of their children. Mrs. Cheema is described as being “relatively young”. She had no criminal record and pleaded guilty to the offence. These were cited as mitigating factors. Nevertheless, the trial judge found that the appropriate sentence could not be less than six years because of the cold-blooded nature of her attempts, over a period of months, to dispose of her husband.
[43] In R. v. Wickham[^9] the British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld a sentence of seven years for a woman who hired somebody to kill her husband. Her motivation was found to be selfish. She wanted her husband gone so that she could be happy with her new boyfriend and she also looked forward to the receipt of the family home and life insurance proceeds after her husband’s death. The Court of Appeal distinguished cited cases with sentences between four and six years on the basis that none of them were for a financial motive.
[44] Defence counsel cited three cases in support of the reformatory sentence he suggests is appropriate: R. v. Murphy;[^10] R. v. Symes;[^11] and R. v. Boyden.[^12] All are somewhat dated. Of the three, the only one I consider relevant is Boyden.
[45] The Murphy case involved an offender who was 20 years old and described as being of “borderline intelligence.” While extremely inebriated, he blew out the back window of a taxicab with a shotgun. Fortunately, the driver (who was in the car at the time) was not injured. The Court of Appeal reduced the five year sentence imposed by the trial judge to three years, mainly based on the offender’s youth, low intellectual level of functioning, and good conduct when not inebriated. There are no parallels between that case and the one before me.
[46] I would also distinguish the circumstances in Symes. The offender in that case had been having marital difficulties with his wife. Following a sleepless night and after having ingested a large quantity of tranquilizers, he placed ether fluid on a cloth and held it over the face of his sleeping wife in an attempt to render her unconscious. The Court of Appeal set aside the conviction for attempted murder as Mr. Symes lacked the intent to kill, and substituted a conviction for administering a noxious substance. The trial judge had imposed a sentence of three months on top of time served of eight months, which he had treated as the equivalent of 16 months. Thus, the effective sentence was 19 months. The Court of Appeal held that this would be an unfit sentence for attempted murder, and at the very low end of the scale for the lesser offence of administering a noxious substance. However, by the time this reached the Court of Appeal the custodial portion of the sentence had been completed and the offender had been out of custody for one and one-half years. In these circumstances, and in light of other extenuating circumstances, the Court of Appeal held that it would be too crushing to the offender’s rehabilitation to put him back in jail. Therefore, the Court did not interfere with the sentence. There is nothing about these circumstances that assist in determining a fit sentence for Mrs. Tokhi. Her crime was akin to attempted murder, it was planned and deliberate over a period of time, and she had the specific intent of causing her husband’s death. None of the mitigating factors present in the Symes case are present here.
[47] The Boyden case is somewhat more on point, but again the mitigating factors present in that case far outweigh the mitigating factors in Mrs. Tokhi’s situation. Mr. Boyden attempted to hire a man to kill the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. The person he first contacted in his search for a hit man notified the police and the hit man Mr. Boyden actually tried to hire was in fact an undercover police officer. The trial judge accepted that Mr. Boyden’s motivation, albeit misguided, was to protect his lover from what he considered to be her abusive husband and to stop the abuse that he believed was driving his lover to kill herself. Mr. Boyden was 62 years old at the time and had led an exemplary life. The trial judge found that the range for this offence was between six and eight and one-half years. He imposed a sentence of three and one-half years on Mr. Boyden because of the strong mitigating factors, those being: a guilty plea; genuine remorse; motivation based on compassion rather than greed or vengeance; and the fact that after agreeing to the hit, he had subsequently attempted to call off the assassin but was unable to reach him. Although Mrs. Tokhi does have some mitigating factors in her favour, they are significantly less compelling than in the Boyden case. In particular, her motivation is not known, she did not attempt to call it off, and I have not found her to be remorseful.
Conclusion
[48] Mrs. Tokhi’s crime was planned and deliberate. The undercover officer gave her ample opportunity to call it off, and she did not. She even talked about killing somebody else after her husband was dead. She has no criminal record, but I am not able to say she is truly remorseful for her crime.
[49] In Mrs. Tokhi’s case, there could well have been a financial motive. Her husband was threatening to leave her if she did not return the missing $75,000.00. Avoiding the financial insecurity of being abandoned with no ability to support herself could have been a motivation for murder. It is even possible that Mrs. Tokhi took the $75,000 herself and was seeking to kill her husband rather than give it back. This motivation would have been an aggravating factor if it had been proven. However, it was not proven. I do not know what motivated Mrs. Tokhi. This is therefore a situation where the aggravating factor of a selfish motive is not present. On the other hand, the mitigating factor of a crime motivated by domestic v