Vic: Jail term cut for wife who plotted husband's killing

AAP General News (Australia)
04-07-2004
Vic: Jail term cut for wife who plotted husband's killing

MELBOURNE, April 7 AAP - A Canadian woman who tried to hire a hitman to kill her husband
while the couple were living in Melbourne today won a reduction in her jail sentence.

Thirty-seven-year-old Dorothy Marie Skura was jailed in July last year for seven years
and ordered to serve a minimum of four and a half years.

But today, the Victorian Court of Appeal cut the minimum term by 18 months and imposed
a maximum term of six years.

An appeal hearing was told that Skura's husband Gerry, 51, had forgiven her.

The three judges of the appeal court today ruled that the sentencing judge had not
given sufficient weight to Mr Skura's victim impact statement in which he expressed support
for his wife.

The appeal court heard that Skura had arranged to pay an undercover police officer
posing as a hitman $25,000 to kill her husband.

AAP sew/gfr/drp/jlw

KEYWORD: SKURA

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