Three Bags of Sugar

Corinna Smith was fifty-nine, a charity volunteer in Neston, Cheshire, and had been married to Michael Baines for thirty-eight years. He was eighty, in failing health, and she was his carer. On July 13, 2020, her daughter told her that Baines had sexually abused her and her brother Craig for years. Craig had taken his own life in 2007.

Smith spent the evening on the phone with family. In the early hours of July 14 she boiled the kettle twice, stirred three bags of sugar into the water in a garden bucket so the liquid would cling, carried it upstairs and poured it over her sleeping husband. The burns reached thirty-six percent of his body. He was taken to the burns unit at Whiston Hospital and died there on August 19, 2020.

Smith admitted what she had done but denied murder, saying she had only meant to hurt him. A jury at Chester Crown Court convicted her on June 15, 2021. On July 9, Mrs Justice Yip sentenced her to life with a minimum term of twelve years, finding that Smith intended serious harm rather than death and had acted in distress rather than to a long-laid plan. A public petition later argued the term was too long.