Now Arthur’s killers could face longer behind bars
THE killers of little Arthur LabinjoHughes could face tougher jail terms after their ‘unduly lenient’ punishments were referred to appeal judges yesterday.
Attorney General Suella Braverman said she believed the sentences handed to Emma Tustin and Thomas Hughes were ‘too low’.
Tustin, 32, was convicted of murdering her six-year-old stepson and ordered to serve a minimum of 29 years’ imprisonment.
Hughes, the boy’s father, was convicted of manslaughter and handed 21 years.
The authorities failed to save the helpless youngster from a relentless campaign of torture and mental abuse.
Heart-breaking recordings of Arthur crying ‘no one loves me’ and ‘no one’s gonna feed me’ before his death in June 2020 were played in court. The case threw into sharp relief the incalculable cost of pandemic restrictions which made the little boy’s unimaginable suffering easier to cover up.
Jurors were told that the 130 areas of bruising found on his malnourished body after his death equated to ‘nearly a bruise for every day of lockdown’.
The Attorney General said last night: ‘I understand how distressing the public have found this case, but it is my job to decide if a sentence appears to be unduly lenient based on the facts of the case.
‘I have carefully considered the details of this case, and I have decided to refer the sentences to the Court of Appeal as I believe them to be too low.
‘Emma Tustin and Thomas Hughes grossly abused their posihis
‘Cold, calculating, torturers’
tion of trust and subjected an innocent child, who they should have been protecting, to continued emotional and physical abuse.’
The cases will be reconsidered by senior Court of Appeal judges on a date yet to be set under the ‘unduly lenient scheme’, which lets the Government’s senior law officer refer cases if they think terms are too short. Tustin, 32, and Hughes, 29, were also convicted of child cruelty.
The case raised serious questions about the actions of social workers, police and the boy’s teachers.
It emerged that social workers investigated bruising on Arthur reported by his grandmother but concluded there were ‘no safeguarding concerns’ after visiting the Solihull home. A teaching assistant who carried out welfare checks on Arthur – by phone – was fobbed off with claims he had been playing in the garden. And when his school reopened after lockdown a week before death, no action was taken when he failed to attend.
The trial at Coventry Crown Court heard Arthur was deprived of water and poisoned with salt. Hughes inflicted ‘pressure point’ torture techniques and made him stand alone for up to 14 hours a day.
Tustin attacked Arthur for the final time on June 16, 2020. Prosecutors said she repeatedly slammed his head on to a hard surface. The court heard Arthur suffered an unsurvivable brain injury. At the pair’s sentencing, Mr Justice Wall described the trial as ‘without doubt one of the most distressing and disturbing cases I have had to deal with’.
Arthur’s maternal grandmother, Madeleine Halcrow, of Birmingham, previously described the killers as ‘cold, calculating, systematic torturers of a defenceless little boy’.
Last month Boris Johnson backed tougher terms for anyone who deliberately kills a child. It could see the introduction of indefinite jail terms in a move dubbed ‘Arthur’s Law’.