Friday, April 26, 2024

Arthur Labinjo-Hughes: Killer father Thomas Hughes has sentence increased by three years

One of the killers of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes has had his prison sentence increased by judges at the Court of Appeal.

Arthur’s stepmother, Emma Tustin, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 29 years in December last year for murder, while his father, Thomas Hughes, was sentenced to 21 years for manslaughter.

The pair appealed against the length of their sentences – which were also referred to appeal court judges for being unduly lenient.

Judges have lengthened Hughes’s jail term by three years, to 24 years, while Tustin’s has remained unchanged.

Tustin and Hughes were convicted of killing the youngster, who suffered an unsurvivable brain injury while in Tustin’s care.

The child, from Solihull in the West Midlands, was poisoned, starved and beaten by Tustin, 32, and Hughes, 29, in a prolonged campaign of abuse.

Court of Appeal judges also reviewed the sentence of Jordan Monaghan.

He was handed three mandatory life sentences and ordered to serve a minimum term of 40 years at Preston Crown Court in December after he murdered two of his children and his new partner.

The 30-year-old obstructed the airways of Ruby, aged 24 days, and Logan, 21 months, in January and August 2013.

While on police bail six years later, he killed his new girlfriend, Evie Adams, 23, with a drug overdose in October 2019.

The decisions about Hughes, Tustin and Monaghan were issued together with further ones about Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard, and Ian Stewart.

Stewart, who murdered his wife and fiancee six years apart, could one day be released from prison after he appealed against his whole life sentence.

He killed 51-year-old children’s author Helen Bailey in 2016 and was found guilty of her murder in 2017.

Following that conviction, police investigated the 2010 death of Stewart’s first wife, Diane Stewart, 47, and in February he was found guilty of her murder.

The double murderer’s appeal against the whole-life term was reviewed by five senior judges and has been reduced

He will now serve a minimum term of 35 years.

Couzens was given a whole life sentence for the rape and murder of 33-year-old Ms Everard, whom he abducted in south London on 3 March 2021.

It was the first time that sentence had been imposed for a single murder of an adult not committed in the course of a terror attack.

Appealing against the term, Couzens’ lawyers argued that he deserved “decades in jail” but said a whole-life term was excessive.

But on Friday, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett, and four other judges refused to lower his sentence.

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