A monster stepmum who killed an innocent six-year-old after torturing and starving him has been jailed for almost 30 years.
Cowardly Emma Tustin refused to enter the dock for her sentencing hearing after being convicted of murdering defenceless Arthur Labinjo-Huges following a nine-week trial.
On Friday she was handed a life sentence with a minimum 29 years.Judge Wall said that will be the earliest point she can be considered for parole, and if that is refused, she will spend the rest of her life behind bars.
Her partner, Arthur’s father Thomas Hughes, was jailed for 21 years after being found guilty of manslaughter.
As the sentencing began, Judge Wall said Tustin was present at Coventry Crown Court but has decided not to come up into the dock to face up to her punishment.
He started by saying the trial had been ‘without doubt one of the most distressing and disturbing cases I have had to deal with’.
Jailing the pair, he said: ‘This cruel and inhuman treatment of Arthur was a deliberate decision by you to brush off his cries for help as naughtiness.’
He said Tustin made a ‘calculated’ decision to kill, telling her: ‘You are a manipulative woman who will tell any lie, and shift the blame on to anyone, to save your own skin.
‘You wanted Thomas Hughes so he could provide for you and your own children, but did not want to be troubled by Arthur any longer.’
He called Hughes’ ‘encouragement’ of his girlfriend’s actions ‘chilling’, adding: ‘You were Arthur’s father, in a position of trust, and bore primary responsibility for protecting him.
‘He was extremely vulnerable and you lied to his school in the last days of Arthur’s life to protect both you and Ms Tustin.’
Tustin, 32, inflicted ‘unsurvivable’ brain injuries on Arthur by smashing his head against a hard surface at her home in Solihull in June last year.
She immediately fetched her phone and took photos of the little boy as he lay dying in the hallway to send to Hughes, who had sent her a text hours earlier saying ‘just end him’.
Arthur’s death followed months of evil abuse that prosecutors said amounted to child torture.
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The campaign of cruelty began when Tustin moved in with Hughes after the nation went into lockdown in March 2020.
The couple starved Arthur, force-fed him salt laced meals, and forced him to stand alone for 14 hours a day.
Haunting audio and video clips recorded in the final weeks of Arthur’s life revealed he could barely speak and was no longer able to support his own weight.
He could be heard crying ‘nobody loves me’ and no one is going to feed me’.
Despite this, Tustin, who has been attacked with salt in prison, pretended to cry in front of police officers sent to her home after she landed the fatal blows, and cruelly tried to blame the boy for causing the injuries himself.
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Arthur was left at the mercy of his dad stepmum after his biological mother, alcoholic Olivia Labinjo-Halcrow, was jailed for stabbing her own partner to death in a drink and drug-fuelled rage in 2019.
It emerged at trial that the six-year-old had been seen by social workers just two months before his death, after concerns were raised by his paternal grandmother, Joanne Hughes, but they concluded there were ‘no safeguarding concerns’.
Ms Hughes, a secondary school teacher, said Arthur was ‘failed by the very authorities’ tasked with keeping him safe.
She said she believed her ‘happy and thriving’ grandson would ‘be alive today’ had her son not met Tustin.
The Government has said it will not hesitate to take action off the back of a review into failings around Arthur’s death.
A spokesman for Boris Johnson said the Prime Minister has been deeply disturbed’ by the case, which saw jurors hold a minute’s silence for Arthur after they returned their verdicts.
After the couple were found guilty, Arthur’s biological mum described her grief.
A statement read out by the boy’s maternal grandmother, Madeleine Halcrow, said she wanted to ‘focus on the life Arthur lived and to celebrate the beautiful little boy I knew and loved deeply’.
But she also spoke about the depths of her grief saying: ‘Every day I feel like I’m walking around with all the lights turned off.’
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