75 year-old Noor Hussain found guilty of murder.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: The trial of Noor Hussain, the 75 year-old Brooklyn man who beat his wife to death with a walking stick in 2011 because she didn’t cook him the dinner he wanted, has ended after a jury found him guilty of murder.
Related Story: Served lentils instead of goat for dinner, Pakistani American man beat his wife to death
Hussain’s conviction was handed down on Thursday, by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew D’Emic. Despite the arguments of Hussain’s defense team, which claimed that the man was simply doing what he thought to be correct because of how he was raised in Pakistan, the judge and jury sided with the prosecution.
District Attorney Sabeeha Madni and fellow prosecutor Josh Charlton said that Hussain had every intention of killing his wife, 66 year-old Nazar Hussain that night. He hit her repeatedly with a walking cane as she was lying down in bed, and allegedly had a history of abusing her for various reasons over the course of their marriage.
Hussain is said to have struck his wife somewhere around 20 times on that tragic night just three years ago. The beating left her bed sheets soaked with blood, along with blood spattered on the wall, and was so severe that a coroner’s determined her brain function had stopped because of the severity of the blows.
And what was the reason for the violence? Hussain wanted goat meat for dinner, but his wife made a vegetarian lentil dish instead. This apparently incensed him so much that he was forced to discipline her, leading to her unfortunate demise. Now, however, it looks like he’ll just have to eat whatever the state of New York feels like feeding him.
Julie Clark, Hussain’s lead defense attorney, hoped to have the murder charge mitigated to that of manslaughter, a less severe offense that could have ensured Hussain would see far less jail time than with the former charge. However, that didn’t pan out, and now Hussain will spend the rest of his life in jail.
Hussain is set to be sentenced next week, at which point he faces 25 years to life behind bars – effectively a life sentence.