A COUPLE who let their baby die after he had taken a lethal dose of methadone are behind bars after being convicted of manslaughter.

Jaquietta Bowyer was jailed for 44 months and her husband Luke was sentenced to 15 months after a jury found them both to blame over the death of their 22-month-old son Jacksa (pictured).

The trial at Winchester Crown Court heard how Jaquietta, 39, tried to frame her teenage daughter Claire Gormley.

Miss Gormley was also charged with manslaughter but was acquitted by the jury. She and the other two defendants had all denied manslaughter.

Jaquietta Bowyer was expressionless as the jury brought in its verdict after deliberating for three hours on Monday, but she smiled at a prison guard as she was taken down to the cells. Miss Gormley, 19, sobbed with relief after she was cleared.

The trial had heard how Jacksa died in June last year because his parents failed to take him to hospital after he swallowed a lethal dose of methadone.

They only called an ambulance when they woke up in the early hours of June 5 to find his lips were blue and he was not breathing.

Mr Justice David Poole told former prostitute and heroin user Jaquietta Bowyer: "Not-withstanding obvious blemishes in your character, it is a character that is not uniformly bad.

"In this case, without a doubt, the least appealing parts of it have been well to the fore - your consumption of hard and dangerous drugs in a house in which you had a child, your criminally negligent decision to run the risk of withholding medical care to Jacksa when he was so in need of it, and your acute resolve right up to conviction to shed the blame on your daughter Claire."

Mr Justice Poole told Luke Bowyer his role in Jacksa's death was very different to that of his wife, because he only found out about his son's condition at 4pm on the day before he died - some time after Jaquietta Bowyer would have known he needed treatment.

The judge told Bowyer: "You certainly allowed yourself to be overruled in any decision about going to the hospital by your wife, who was 12 years older than you and with a strong personality."

During the three-week trial, the prosecution played tapes from police bugs placed in the Bowyer's former home in Berwyn Close, Buckskin, Basingstoke, during the days after Jacksa's death. These recorded the parents threatening Miss Gormley, and an aggressive Jaquietta Bowyer bullying her into telling the police she was the only one who knew Jacksa had taken the methadone.

Referring to the use of the listening bugs, Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Wheeler, the officer in charge of the investigation into Jacksa's death, said: "We can only use this technology in the most serious cases, like the death of a child, and we did this to elicit the true facts concerning the death of Jacksa.

"Because of the probes, the courts were able to listen to both what the defendants said and their demeanour. We were delighted that we were able to put the fullest facts to both the judge and the jury to enable them to reach what I consider is a fair decision."

The police were never able to say exactly how Jacksa came to drink the methadone.

Mr Justice Poole said: "It's a constant source of worry that it is felt right by medical and social agencies that this poison, in the form of a drinkable syrup, should be so abundantly available where it is open to circulation onto the black market and where, time and again, it ends up on kitchen and bedroom shelves as a lure for the very young and unwise."