Hamzah mother jailed for starving son to death
A mother who starved her four-year-old son and left his body in a cot for nearly two years is jailed in “as bad a case of unlawful killing of a child by a parent as it is possible to imagine”.
Warning: Some people may find details in this report distressing
Amanda Hutton, 43, received a 12-year sentence for the manslaughter of Hamzah Khan and a further three years for child cruelty.
Hamzah’s body was found in squalor at Hutton’s home in Bradford in September 2011.
His eldest brother Tariq Khan, 24, was given a two-year suspended sentence for preventing his burial. He told police that his mother told him she would kill her other children if he told anyone about Hamzah’s death.
Four-year-old Hamzah was wearing a nappy and dressed in a baby-gro designed for a six to nine-month-old child. His body had been left in a cot for nearly two years, Bradford crown court was told.
Judge Roger Thomas said: “So it is then that your case, Amanda Hutton, has to be regarded as as bad a case of unlawful killing of a child by a parent as it is possible to imagine.”
The judge said the court had heard that it was very rare for four-year-olds to be starved to death.
Addressing Hutton, he said: “Although it beggars belief that such a thing can happen, it has, of course, happened here. It has done so through your purposeful, persistent and gross conduct in failing in that most basic and fundamental requirement that is upon every parent, to feed her child adequately.”
Hutton, an alcoholic, admitted neglecting five of her other children aged between five and 13, who were living in the same conditions.
‘Wicked conduct’
Judge Thomas told her: “The details of your wicked conduct have been displayed in such awful detail over the past three weeks in the trial that concluded yesterday.”
He said the offences “demonstrate a most fundamental and serious breach of any duty that an individual in decent society can owe to others – namely the duty that a parent owes to her or his young children to take proper care of them”.
The judge said the children were found in a situation that was “breathtakingly awful”.
He said the manslaughter of Hamzah, pictured above, involved “failing to provide him with anything like adequate nourishment over a long period of time – in short you starved him to death”.
In terms of the five child cruelty charges she admitted, the judge said that related to a period of nearly three years “when, on an ever declining scale, you failed your young children, causing them to live in quite appalling conditions of squalor which understandably shocked even the most seasoned police officers who attended your home in September 2011”.
‘Devious’
Judge Thomas said Hutton’s “deviousness” had ensured that “various agencies” were kept away from her family.
He recalled how an experienced pediatrician told the jury how her visit to Hutton’s house after Hamzah’s body was discovered was “the most extreme example of neglect” she had encountered in her career.
The judge said it was clear Hutton had an alcohol problem and that “you placed your own selfish addiction to drink well before your responsibilities to your many children”.