A US woman has been sentenced to 20 years in jail for killing her five-year-old son by poisoning him with salt to gain attention online.
Lacey Spears, 27, fed her son Garnett-Paul Spears salt through a breathing tube from infancy while blogging about motherhood.
The “mommy blogger” — who was convicted of second-degree murder — wrote about her son’s mysterious illness on a personal blog called Garnett’s Journey.
In sentencing, Judge Robert Neary said while Spears suffered from the mental illness known as Munchausen by proxy, she was guilty of a crime “unfathomable in its cruelty”.
During the trial the court heard how Spears had given her son lethal doses of salt through a feeding tube at their home in suburban New York because she craved the attention it gave her.
She then twice took him into a bathroom at hospital to do the same before posting pictures of him dying on her Facebook account, the BBC reports.
Judge Neary said the woman’s son had suffered “five years of torment and pain”.
“One does not have to be a psychiatrist to realise you suffer from Munchausen by proxy,” Neary said as he resisted calls to give Spears a 25-year sentence sought by prosecutors.
Munchausen by proxy is a disorder which in some cases sees a caregiver fabricate or induce physical or health problems for those in their care.
District Attorney Janet DiFiore said Spears’s son had suffered “repeated hospitalisations, unneeded surgical procedures and ultimately poisoning with salt — all at the hands of the one person who should have been his ultimate protector: his mother.”
“Using the child’s ‘illnesses” to self-aggrandise herself, her actions directly lead to her son’s tortured death,” DiFiore said
