Anglonautes > English vocabulary / words > Law, Justice > United Kingdom / UK > Sentencing

Friday 2 August 2013
13.03 BST
Theguardian.com
Steven Morris
This article was published on guardian.co.uk
at 13.03 BST
on Friday 2 August 2013.
A version appeared on p4 of the Main section section
of theguardian.com on Saturday 3 August 2013.
It was last modified at 00.01 BST
on Saturday 3 August 2013.
It was first published at 12.42 BST
on Friday 2 August 2013.

The mother and stepfather of Daniel Pelka have been jailed for life for starving, torturing and battering the four-year-old boy to death.

Magdelena Luczak, 27, and her partner, Mariusz Krezolek, 34, were told they would serve at least 30 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.

Sentencing the pair at Birmingham crown court, the judge, Mrs Justice Cox, said the pair had subjected Daniel to "unimaginable acts of cruelty".

She said a "particularly grave" feature was that they had systematically starved him. "He was literally wasting away," the judge said, noting that experts had compared his body to that of concentration camp victims.

The judge said that the fatal attack was a "brutal assault" carried out after he had been force-fed salt and subjected to a "cold water punishment" in which he was held under water in the bath.

She said the couple had carefully lied to the authorities before and after Daniel's death, "cynically" deceiving teachers and welfare and medical officers.

The pair had shown no remorse during the trial, she said, and held them jointly culpable: "Yours was a partnership of equals."

In mitigation, Stephen Linehan QC, for Luczak, had asked the judge not to "snuff out" hope for her. "This young woman came to this country hoping for a better life and now she is facing a life in prison. She has lost everything. Her situation is truly desperate."

Nigel Lambert QC, for Krezolek, said his client had no previous convictions for violence. Krezolek was ashamed and shocked at his cruelty to Daniel, but still insisted he had not intended to kill the boy, Lambert said, arguing that this set him apart from offenders who set out to murder a child.

Eleven of the 12 jurors who convicted the pair returned to see them sentenced.

During the nine-week trial, the jurors had heard how Luczak and Krezolek systematically denied Daniel meals and force-fed him salt to make him vomit when he was caught sneaking extra food. He was so hungry that he stole sandwiches from other children at school and dug through bins for discarded apple cores.

One child protection expert who examined the boy's body said she had seen such emaciation only in pictures of concentration camp victims. A radiologist compared Daniel's frame to that of a seriously ill cancer patient, and a police detective said he looked like child from a famine-ridden part of Africa.

The couple kept him locked for long periods in a tiny, unheated box room, which he had to use as a toilet, at the family home in Coventry. They ordered him to adopt stress positions used by torturers and to go on endurance runs around the house.

When the pair believed he had misbehaved they threw him into cold baths and his mother once boasted that she had almost drowned him, while his sibling, who cannot be identified, reported that they had once seen the boy's head being held under water.

Daniel died in March last year after being hit around the head by one or both adults. His body was laid out on a bed next to his terrified sibling and Luczak and Krezolek waited more than 30 hours before calling 999.

During the trial it emerged that professionals – including health workers and police – had had numerous contacts with the family. Teachers at his school, Little Heath primary, had seen him scavenging for food and noticed injuries to his face but no effective action was taken to protect him.

A serious case review is being carried out by the Coventry safeguarding children board. The review has already scrutinised the actions of all the agencies involved with Daniel and the plan is to publish the findings within six weeks once new information that arose during the trial has been taken into account.

On Thursday the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, branded the treatment meted out to the boy as evil and vile. Speaking during his weekly phone-in on the London radio station LBC, Clegg said: "Clearly people must have seen something was wrong with this boy. We all ask the same questions: how did this happen? What happened when teachers saw this boy scavenging in bins, when they saw him lose all that weight? They apparently did pass information on – why did no one act on it?

"So many teachers and people in the NHS and social work that I know have only the best interests of children at heart. It's not a lack of motive. But I think what people worry about is that maybe one bit of the system doesn't talk to another bit of the system."

Jurors, who had sat through a wealth of evidence charting six months of systematic abuse of the defenceless youngster, took less than four hours to unanimously convict Luczak and former soldier Krezolek, both Polish nationals, on Wednesday.

Daniel Pelka's mother and stepfather jailed for life,
G,
2 August 2013,
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/02/
daniel-pelka-mother-stepfather-jailed-life

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