17 years for murdering partner with a steak knife
A WOMAN must serve a 17-year jail sentence after being found guilty for a second time of stabbing her boyfriend to death with a steak knife, following a retrial.
Emma-Jayne Magson, 28, killed 26-year-old James Knight with a single stab wound to the heart after a drunken row in March 2016.
She denied murdering James at her first trial, claiming it was self-defence.
But she was convicted at Leicester Crown Court at the end of 2016 and jailed for the minimum 17-year term.
Magson was convicted again on March 5 after a retrial on psychiatric grounds that she could have pleaded diminished responsibility.
But yesterday she was condemned by Mr Justice Jeremy Baker who said he would have given a longer sentence if not prevented by the law.
He said: “Without any justification, you made a conscious decision to fetch a steak knife from the kitchen and used it to inflict a fatal wound to James Knight’s chest. I am unconvinced you have, as yet, any real remorse.”
Birmingham Crown Court heard Magson and her partner had been out in Leicester city centre in the early hours of March 27, 2016.
They took a taxi home but began arguing and the cab driver asked them to get out. CCTV footage showed James push Magson, causing her to fall and was later heard banging on her front door.
Magson claimed she “hit out” at him in the kitchen when he grabbed her by the throat, after she “inadvertently” picked up a knife. Neighbours
were woken by the argument, one hearing the victim say “my heart is bleeding”.
James collapsed but Magson delayed getting help, hiding the knife in a neighbour’s bin, taking his blood-stained T-shirt indoors, changing her clothes and then “calmly” calling 999.
The court heard she lied about the gravity of his injuries to the call handler and told James’ brother Kevin he had been “beaten up by bouncers”.
Jurors were told Magson had once attacked her partner with a vacuum cleaner pipe and also previously stabbed him with an item of cutlery.
She had previous convictions for assaulting three women, putting a glass into the face of one of them. Her sentence will run from November 2016, the end of the original trial.