The Supreme Court has handed down its decision in the appeal of Yonatan Heilo, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison after murdering his rapist.
The court changed the charge from murder to manslaughter, and reduced his sentence to 12 years.
Heilo originally received 20 years instead of life imprisonment, after the parties agreed that he had been a victim of sexual assaults by the murder victim, Yaron Eilin.
The murder took place in May 2010, when Heilo, who was 23 years old at the time, came with a friend to the commercial center in the Kiryat Nordau neighborhood in Netanya, where he met Eilin. Eilin demanded that Heilo pay him 1,000 shekels “by tomorrow or the day after,” or else he would “get a beating.”
Heilo said that there had been similar instances in the weeks preceding the murder. At some point the two men walked over to an empty lot. When Eilin turned around to urinate, Heilo choked him and hit him on the head with bricks. The next day he turned himself in to the police.
Only during his third interrogation did Heilo tell the police that about two weeks before the murder, Eilin had sodomized him twice, a few days apart. “I was afraid.
I said I only hope he won’t do that again, because the place was dark.
I was afraid he would do it again,” said Heilo, explaining how he had felt in the empty lot. “I saw him from behind. When he was about to turn around, because of my fury and all my anger, I choked him. I was afraid he would kill me, I was afraid he would rape me again.”
The State Prosecutor and the judges of the Lod District Court agreed that Heilo had been a victim of extortion and sodomy.
But “even if the accused was a victim of terrible and harsh acts on the part of the deceased, there are legal ways of dealing with such acts, and taking another person’s life should not be legitimized,” the ruling said.
Heilo’s defense attorney, Alon Eisenberg, appealed to the Supreme Court against the conviction and the punishment, and the appeal was discussed in December 2014.
The state was opposed and requested that the decision of the District Court remain unchanged.
The Supreme Court responded to an appeal on Tuesday by Yonatan Heilo over his 2013 murder conviction stemming from the death of Yaron Eilin in 2010. The court altered the conviction from murder to manslaughter, and reduced Heilo’s sentence by 8 years, from 20 to just 12.
Heilo claimed in his defense that Eilin, whom he had met as a minor in 2006, had raped him repeatedly over the years, in addition to using threats of violence to extort money from Heilo.
When the two met one night in May, 2010, Heilo claims Eilin threatened to rape him a third time. The defendant said he acted in self-defense, strangling Eilin, then bludgeoning him to death with bricks. He later dragged the body to a nearby garbage dump before turning himself in to police.
A Lod district court rejected Heilo’s argument that he had defended himself, ruling that the killing was a premeditated act of revenge for sexual abuse suffered at the hands of Eilin.
Dozens of high-profile supporters, including MKs, senior jurists, and academics chastised the lower court’s decision, demanding that Heilo’s “distressed background” be more fully considered in rendering a decision.
With the high court’s decision Heilo’s 20 year sentence has been reduced to 12 years, of which 6 have already been served. Heilo could be freed in just two years if he is approved for an early release for good behavior.