Carey Birmingham, Spring, Texas man convicted of shooting dead cheating wife on video sentenced to just 10 years jail.
A crime of passion? Disconcert has come to the fore after a Texas man caught on video shooting dead his wife for cheating on him was earlier this week sentenced to just ten years jail.
‘Alright, goodbye. You’re (going to) meet Jesus,’ Carey Birmingham told his wife, Patricia Birmingham, in December 2021, before he shot her with his gun outside their home in Spring.
The killing was caught on video and despite the overwhelming evidence, Birmingham will serve only ten years in prison – the maximum being 20.
‘The defense was never about justification’
In the video, Carey can be heard firing his gun three times.
‘I hope it was worth it,’ the husband said.
Patricia and Carey had roughly a 30-minute argument leading up to the shooting, with the couple’s daughter at school.
Audio obtained by ABC13 contains several minutes before the video that became a large part of Carey’s crime of passion defense.
‘I am (expletive) done,’ the man says in the video.
‘I am (expletive) done too,’ Patricia replied.
The two’s argument, which was sparked by Carey’s allegedly learning of Patricia’s affair, became more and more heated.
Carey’s defense attorney, Anthony Osso, said they pleaded guilty directly to an all-female jury. He said their strategy was to accept responsibility but convince jurors that Carey shot Patricia in the heat of the moment.
‘We never tried to justify the actions of our client, but the defense wasn’t about justification. It was about why he did what he did,’ Osso said.
Carey was given a 10-year sentence with the possibility of parole after five years.
Premeditated or crime of passion?
Others meanwhile wondered, had the wife not admitted to cheating on her husband whether the all female jury would have instead sentenced the ‘abusive’ man sentencing him to 20 years jail.
Speaking on her father’s sentencing, daughter Olivia told ABC13: ‘I lost both my parents that day.
‘My dad died that day, too, because the person who did that to my mom and my father aren’t the same person.’
She added: ‘I don’t know, sudden passion? You have to have something. You have to have made that decision within you for a while; I feel like to do something, to do that to someone you really love.’
Olivia had addressed her father in court, telling him: ‘No matter what was said in this trial, you know what type of woman she was, and you know what you did and how he took away my favorite person in this world.’
Olivia also testified that she had never witnessed her father physically abuse her mother.
She told ABC13 that she wanted to raise awareness about different types of abuse, and that she would never forgive her father for what he did.
