A court in Istanbul on Friday handed down a life sentence for C.G.B (identified by initials), a man convicted of slaying a young woman with a samurai sword in the city last year.

Başak Cengiz, an architect, was walking on the street in Ataşehir, a district on the Asian side of Istanbul where she was temporarily residing for a project when the assailant showed up. C.G.B. had started hitting her repeatedly with the sword and was later captured by the police. The defendant had sought an insanity plea, claiming "the devil made him do it," while his mother, who also served as his lawyer, had claimed that he had been suffering from mental issues since he was a child and had rejected treatment and medication in the past few years.

However, an expert witness report by the Justice Ministry’s Council of Forensic Medicine found C.G.B sane. The court accepted the veracity of the report in Friday’s hearing.

Cengiz’s family repeatedly asked the court to issue the "heaviest" sentence for C.G.B. while the victim’s mother Beyhan Cengiz disputed "health reports" of the defendant’s alleged mental disorders. "He perfectly understands whatever we speak here and he clearly planned this murder. He never forgot any detail," she told the court, urging judges to hand down an "exemplary" verdict. C.G.B., who attended the hearing via videolink from the prison where he was kept, said he had "nothing to say" while his lawyers sought to reduce his sentence, claiming the murder was not "premeditated."

The court rejected the plea and ruled aggravated life imprisonment, the harshest sentence in Turkish laws, which rules out the possibility of early release.

The incident, which occurred on Nov. 9, 2021, had renewed outrage against femicides which claim dozens of lives in Turkey every year. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a critic of lax interpretation of laws on domestic violence and femicides, had visited the family last year to pay his condolences. Erdoğan also had hosted the family and families of other women who were murdered at the hands of men, over an iftar dinner last week at the presidential complex.