The attorney general is under increasing pressure from MPs and campaigners to ask the court of appeal to reconsider the sentence of a man who strangled his wife days into the first coronavirus lockdown. Anthony Williams, 70, was sentenced to five years in jail at Swansea crown court on Thursday after he was found not guilty of murder but admitted manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. The judge, Paul Thomas, said it was a “tragic case on several levels” but in his view Williams’ mental state was “severely affected at the time”. The Labour MP Harriet Harman said on Friday that she would write to the attorney general for England and Wales, Suella Braverman, to ask her to refer the case to appeal as an unduly lenient sentence. Fellow Labour MP Jess Phillips said she would join calls for the sentence to be reviewed. Harman said: “If he had killed his neighbour, or his neighbour’s wife, it’s inconceivable that he would have got five years. “This sentence is a result of the culture of excuses that surrounds domestic violence. It must be perverse that you get a discount on your sentence if your victim is your wife, when you’re killing somebody who should be able to trust you, and should be able to be safe in her own home.” Ruth Williams, a retired supermarket worker, was found slumped with a set of keys in her hand in the porch of her home in Cwmbran, south Wales, on the morning of 28 March last year. A postmortem found her neck was fractured in five places and she had suffered haemorrhaging in her eyes, face and mouth consistent with strangulation. Her cause of death was given as pressure to the neck, and the pathologist said the lack of a ligature mark did not rule out use of a soft dressing gown cord found at the couple’s home. During his trial the jury heard Williams had admitted to detectives that he had “literally choked the living daylights” out of his wife. He said he had found lockdown “really hard” just five days into the UK-wide restrictions and felt depressed, and told police he had attacked his wife after she told him to “get over it”. Dr Alison Witts, a psychiatrist, told the trial Williams’ anxiety and depressive illness were heightened by the coronavirus measures and impaired his ability to exercise self-control. Another psychiatrist, however, Dr Damian Gamble, said Williams had no documented history of depressive illness and had “no psychiatric defences” available to him. he said he believed Williams “knew what he was doing at the time”. Domestic violence campaigners have raised concerns about the sentence. A spokesperson for Welsh Women’s Aid said the service had experienced an increase in demand during the pandemic, and that the virus and lockdown must not be used to justify or excuse abuse. “We are shocked by the leniency in this case and a precedent must not be set that allows domestic homicide to be an inevitable result of the current restrictions,” the spokesperson said. “Domestic homicides often follow years of coercive and controlling abuse and it is vital this is understood by all in our justice system.” Harriet Wistrich, the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, said the sentencing laid bare “deep-seated discriminatory attitudes”. “It is clear that women who resist male violence are punished most severely, whereas men who throttle their wives to death for no apparent reason are just ‘tragic’ figures,” she said. Sentencing, the judge said: “The overwhelming greatest tragedy here is a lady of 67, who had so much to live for, had her life ended by an act of great violence at the hands, literally, of a man she loved for very nearly 50 years.”