The evil killers of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes could die behind bars in a bid to toughen up their current sentences. The six-year-old suffered systematic abuse at the hands of his stepmother Emma Tustin and dad Thomas Hughes before he was murdered in June 2020.
The crime shocked the nation and Tustin was sentenced to a minimum of 29 years for murder while Hughes was jailed for 21 years for manslaughter. The pair could soon be hit with whole life orders after attorney general Suella Braverman applied for their current sentences to be beefed up, Birmingham Live reports.
The Royal Courts of Justice will hear the application alongside three other cases - also including the killer of Sarah Everard, former police officer Wayne Couzens on May 4 and 5. Double murderer Ian Stewart and child killer Jordan Monaghan will be the other cases heard.
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Stewart, convicted of murdering his first wife six years before he went on to murder his fiancée, is due to appeal against his whole life order. He killed 51-year-old children's book author Helen Bailey in 2016 and dumped her body in the cesspit of the £1.5million home they shared in Royston in Hertfordshire.
A trial previously heard it was most likely she was suffocated while sedated by drugs, and Stewart was found guilty of her murder in 2017. After that conviction, police investigated the 2010 death of Stewart's first wife, Diane. The cause of her death was recorded at the time as sudden unexplained death in epilepsy, but he was later found guilty of her murder.
The minimum 40-year term handed to Monaghan after he murdered two of his children and his new partner will also be reviewed by the judges considering how whole-life orders are imposed. The Attorney General is expected to challenge Monaghan's sentence.
In December 2021, Monaghan was jailed after smothering his 24-day-old daughter Ruby as she slept in a Moses basket on New Year's Day 2013. Eight months later, he smothered his 21-month-old son Logan, and six years after that he murdered his new partner, Evie Adams, with a drugs overdose.
Ex-Pc Couzens was handed a whole-life term last year after raping and murdering 33-year-old Ms Everard after he abducted her in south London on March 3, 2021. Sentencing Couzens, Lord Justice Fulford said the circumstances of the case were "devastating, tragic and wholly brutal" and were so exceptional that it warranted a whole-life order.
It was the first time the sentence had been imposed for a single murder of an adult not committed in the course of a terror attack.
