Did not want death for killer, says wife
WASHINGTON: Adam Purinton, 52, murdered her husband in a premeditative and racially motivated attack that changed Sunayana Dumala’s life as she had never imagined. But she never wanted him to be made to pay for his crime with his own life.
“Neither I nor my family ever wanted a death penalty, because we did not believe in taking a life for life,” Dumala wrote in an email to Hindustan Times on Saturday in response to a question if she would have wanted the death penalty for her husband’s killer.
“Srinu would have also wanted the same,” she went on to say, referring to her husband Srinivas Kuchibhotla. “At the same time,” Dumala added, “we would have respected the decision of (the) judiciary system if they decided on a death penalty.”
Kuchibhotla, an Indian IT engineer working with Garmin GPS manufacturers, was shot dead by Purinton on February 22, 2017, as he sat at a bar with his col- league Alok Madasani in Olathe, Kansas. Before the shooting, Purinton had asked the Indians their legal status, yelling at them to “get out of my country”. Kansas has death penalty but no execution has taken place since 1965.
In the guilty plea deal Purinton had entered, the life sentence was the maximum he could be granted. And he was given the maximum sentence for each of the three charges against him.
Purinton also faces federal hate crime, which carries death penalty as the maximum sentence. But it was not clear if federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty.