WESTERN BUREAU — St James resident and mother of a three-month-old baby, Novlene Wilkie, who murdered her boyfriend in a jealous rage last year, was yesterday sentenced to four years’ imprisonment at hard labour for the crime.

The sentence was handed down by Justice Mahadev Dukharan in the St James Circuit Court.

The court was told that on March 25 last year, Wilkie was at home with her 22 year-old boyfriend, Derron Robinson, at Tucker District in the parish when, at about 2:30 am, he was called from the house by a female visitor.

Robinson went out to the young woman and while they were speaking outside the house, Wilkie, armed with a knife, went out to them and stabbed Robinson three times. He was taken to the Cornwall Regional Hospital in Montego Bay where he was pronounced dead and Wilkie, who was six months pregnant at the time, was arrested and charged for the offence.

During the preliminary hearing before the Montego Bay Resident Magistrate’s Court in June last year, her attorney, Ronald Paris, told the court that his client had not had an easy childhood.

In fact, he said she had been a victim of sexual and physical abuse for most of her life.

He told the court then, that Wilkie had been subject to sexual abuse by the older men in her life from the time she was seven years old through to when she was 16. He also pointed to a scar that runs from her forehead and down the bridge of her nose that, he said, was caused by an acid attack carried out by her brother.

“She’s not someone who has a history of violence,” Paris argued then, in a bid to attract the court’s mercy. “She’s someone who has had violence done to her.”

Yesterday, Observer sources said it was brought to the fore that the revelations made by Paris in the Resident Magistrate’s Court last June had been found to be true by a social inquiry done into the young woman’s life.

But the sources said that while Justice Dukharan publicly recognised that she had not, in fact, had an easy upbringing, he said her experience was no justification for committing murder.

Nonetheless, the judge is reported to have said he would recommend that she be given counselling during her period of incarceration.