THE PARENTS of toddler Jacksa Bowyer have been jailed for failing to seek medical help after he fatally swallowed the heroin substitute methadone.

Jacksa, aged 22 months, died an agonising death because Luke Bowyer and wife Jacquietta did nothing to help and then tried to pin the blame on the child's older half-sister.

Yesterday at Winchester Crown Court a five-woman and six-man jury found Bowyer, 27, of Jessamine Road, Shirley Warren, Southampton and Jacquietta Bowyer, 39, formerly of Berwyn Close, Basingstoke, guilty of manslaughter after deliberating for three hours and 20 minutes. He was jailed for 15 months.

Mrs Bowyer was jailed for 44 months.

Neither showed any emotion as the unanimous verdicts were returned. Mrs Bowyer's daughter Claire Gormley, 19, burst into tears as she was cleared of manslaughter.

The trial heard there was no way of knowing whether ten millilitres of the drug was deliberately given to Jacksa or if he accidentally swallowed it at the family home in June 2001, hours before he was pronounced dead at North Hampshire Hospital, Basingstoke.

The court heard how Mrs Bowyer refused to seek medical help because the child might have been taken into care. Instead she telephoned a drug dealer friend who advised her to contact the emergency services but she ignored this.

The court also heard that Mrs Bowyer had bullied her daughter, Ms Gormley, of Buttermere Drive, Warndon, Worcestershire, into falsely confessing she had left the drug in an available position.

Sentencing Mr Bowyer, Mr Justice Poole said: "I accept the assumption of your counsel that yours was a role far, far subordinate to that of your wife. You allowed yourself to be overruled by your wife who was 12 years older than you and with a far stronger will and personality."

Sentencing Mrs Bowyer, Mr Justice Poole added: "Your counsel has said that notwithstanding the obvious blemishes in your character, it is a character that is not uniformly bad. In this case the least appealing parts came to the fore: your consumption of hard and dangerous drugs in a house that was home to three children; your criminally negligent decision to withhold medical care from Jacksa and your cold resolve to shed blame on to your daughter Claire."

The judge said Mrs Bowyer's negligence was ironically motivated by the desire not to lose her other children to social services.

He added: "It is a constant source of wonder that it is felt by the medical and social agencies that this poison in the form of drinkable syrup should be so abundantly available where it is open to circulation on to the black market, and it ends up on the kitchen and the bedroom shelf as a lure for the young and unwise."

Nick Atkinson, mitigating for Mrs Bowyer, now estranged from her husband and daughter, said: "The fact that the lady was devastated by the death is not in dispute."