The woman accused of killing her infant daughter in a microwave earlier this year was arraigned this afternoon on charges of murder and assault causing death to a child under the age of 8.

Ka Yang, 29, also faces a special circumstance that the murder was intentional and involved torture, which, if found true, could make her eligible for the death penalty or life without parole.

Yang was arraigned in a Sacramento Superior courtroom at the county Main Jail, where she has been held since her arrest Tuesday.

Sacramento police allege that Yang killed her 7-week-old daughter, Mirabelle Thao-Lo, by putting the baby in a microwave on March 17. The infant suffered thermal burns that police attribute to the appliance.

Yang told police she suffered a seizure while holding the baby and woke up on the ground with the injured baby next to her, possibly burned by a nearby space heater. But detectives rejected that claim based on the child's injuries - she was burned head-to-toe, but her pajamas and her hair were not burned - and what they saw as inconsistencies in Yang's accounts.

There have only been three other known cases nationwide of children being injured in a microwave, two of them fatally.

Read more of this story at SacBee.com