Woman who killed daughter's rapist to be sent back to jail

María del Carmen García is expected to be sent to jail again after being found guilty of killing a man who raped her daughter by setting fire to him. The regional high court of Alicante has rejected a plea by her lawyer to order a stay on her imprisonment.

The government denied García's request for a partial pardon of her jail term, but she is appealing this decision with the Supreme Court. She had already spent a year in prison while awaiting her trial. The Alicante court did not specify when her sentence would begin.

García was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for throwing gasoline on the man, who was out of jail on furlough. The Alicante High Court initially sentenced her to nine-and-a-half years in jail but this was reduced to five-and-a-half by the Supreme Court, which ruled that she had suffered a mental breakdown when she saw the man who had sexually abused her daughter.

Her lawyer appealed the government's rejection of a pardon on the grounds that the decision was "discriminatory" and "arbitrary."

García denied that revenge was the motive for murdering 69-year-old Antonio Cosme Velasco when she happened to see him in a bar in her home town of Benejúzar, when he was out on day release in June 2005.

Velasco was six years into his nine-year sentence for the rape, which took place in 1998 when García's daughter was only 13 years old.