Mother jailed after son drowned as she checked Facebook

Claire Barnett was on her phone checking Facebook when her son fell into a pond while playing at home in March 2014

A woman in Britain was jailed for five years for child cruelty after her two-year-old son drowned while she was checking Facebook on her phone.

Claire Barnett, 31, was on her phone checking Facebook when her son Joshua Barnett fell into a pond while playing in the garden at his home in March 2014. She made an attempt to save the child but he died in hospital later that same day.

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During the hearing at Hull crown court on Friday, Judge Jeremy Richardson criticised Barnett for her “bad parenting” and stated that she posed a danger to any child for whom she had responsibility.

Barnett had also been accused of child neglect on a previous occasion. In August 2013, she had let her son play out in the road where he narrowly avoided being hit by a car. Neighbours had contacted social services after witnessing the incident. Barnett pleaded guilty to four counts of child cruelty.

“Your son died due to your neglectful conduct. You will have to live with that for the remainder of your life. For a parent to behave as you did, repeatedly, amounts to consistently bad parenting,” the judge said.

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“I trust that you will never be allowed to have further unsupervised contact to any child. If you should have any further children, they will almost certainly be removed from you. You pose very serious risks to any child for whom you might have responsibility,” he added.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian