A woman convicted of hiring her drug dealing lover to kill her wealthy Indian doctor husband has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
A federal jury in Ohio decided to the send Donna Moonda, 48, to prison without parole after rejecting the prosecution plea for a death sentence.
The prosecution had charged the woman with promising her lover half of his 69-year-old husband Gulam Moonda's multimillion dollar estate if he killed him.
Moonda had maintained her innocence throughout and her lawyers plan to appeal the decision after she is formally sentenced on September 17. The judge cannot change the jury's decision.
The jury decided against death sentence after her lawyer David Grant argued that she suffered from personality disorder and her lover, Damian Bradford, 26, was sentenced to seventeen and half years in jail.
Prosecutors had demanded death penalty for her, arguing that she had got her husband killed for money.
Bradford, who met Moonda in drug rehabilitation programme, testified during Moonda's trial that he had shot the doctor in the side of the head after Donna pulled over on the turnpike, supposedly to let her husband take the wheel on May 13, 2005.
The jury favoured life imprisonment after Judge David D. Dowd Jr. told it that it no other option than giving death sentence or imprisonment without parole.
US Attorney Greg White expressed satisfaction with the sentence.
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