Ka Yang, the 26-year-old US woman who killed her one-month-old daughter by putting her in a microwave oven, has been sentenced to 26 years of life imprisonment by a Sacramento County Superior Court judge on Friday.

In 2011, Yang was convicted of first-degree murder and assault for putting her daughter in the microwave for up to five minutes at their home in Sacramento. According to prosecutors the child suffered fatal thermal injuries. The child’s pacifier was discovered by the investigators inside the microwave, News.com.au reports.

According to Yang’s attorney, Kang was in the middle of an epileptic seizure when she put the baby inside the microwave. The seizures, Kang’s attorney said, renders the person irrational.

“So they appear to be engaging in intentional conduct, but the truth is it is sort of automatic. It’s robotic. It is not the product of careful and rational thought,” Kang’s attorney Linda Parisi told CBS13 in 2012.

“I never thought that with my seizure I will lose my little girl,” Yang told CBS13 in 2012.

But paramedics said that though she had a history of seizures, she was not at all baffled at the time they arrived at the scene. There were also several discripancies in her statement.

Yang had first claimed that she lost consciousness while holding the baby and when she came back to her senses she found the injured baby next to a space heater. The Independent reported that according to the prosecutors, the child was deliberately put in the microwave because she was disturbing Yang in her work.

Yang has three other children who are presently being cared for by other family members.

In 1999, Elizabeth Renee Otte, a 19-year-old mother who lived in Virginia, killed her infant son in a similar way. She had put her one-month-old son in the microwave and kept it switched on while she went off to bed. The jurors in her case had accepted her defence that she was in an epileptic seizure and had no idea of what she was doing. She was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment.

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