An Indian-born man who carried out an "especially frightening and risky assault" on his pregnant wife was sentenced in the Launceston Magistrates Court to nine-months' jail on Monday.
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Gaurav Endlay, 41, of Chudleigh, sat on the stomach of his pregnant wife Parul Bhatt, grabbed her throat and squeezed, punched her face and deprived her of her liberty and grabbed her by the hair and dragged her through the house on September 30, 2019.
He was found guilty of common assault by Magistrate Simon Brown who backdated the sentence to October 3 when Endlay was taken into custody.
"It was a sustained assault over a prolonged period of time in which you threatened to kill her unborn baby, said she had caused her father's death from cancer, that you would f... her mother and tried to control where she slept and stopped her putting on the lights," Mr Brown said.
"It was an episode which was obviously terrifying and was meant to be so."
He said the fact that Ms Bhatt was pregnant was an aggravating factor.
Mr Brown rejected a defence submission that 17 months which Endlay spent in custody in 2016-17 while on remand for a charge of ill-treatment of a child from another marriage should be taken into account.
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The court heard that the charge never proceeded in the Supreme Court.
However, last year Coroner Olivia McTaggart found that Endlay had caused the death of his 11-week-old daughter Charlotte Lukendlay through an act unknown. She found Endlay had been disappointed that the baby was not a boy.
"I do not accept the proposition that time in custody on a separate charge be treated as a bank of days to be offset against later offending," Mr Brown said.
He also dismissed defence arguments for the suspension of some of the jail sentence saying that Endlay had demonstrated a complete lack of real insight into the seriousness of his offending.
The court heard that Endlay also had a prior conviction for a 2016 common assault of his previous wife Rongrong Lu and breach of family violence.