Mother gets life in jail for poisoning son with medicine

A mother who poisoned her son over four years was jailed for life yesterday.

Michelle Dickinson tricked doctors into prescribing anti-convulsant drugs that her son, Michael, did not need when he was three years old. She told them he had epilepsy and used the medication to leave him in a "pitiful state" of "stupefaction". Dickinson then tried to kill him by interfering with his feeding tube as he was taken to hospital by ambulance. He died, aged seven, several months later in October 2000.

Dickinson, 31, who was convicted of attempting to murder her son and of four charges of cruelty, was told yesterday she would serve at least eight years and four months of her life sentence.

She suffers from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition that makes sufferers seek attention by harming others. But Mr Justice Pitchers said her disorder did not reduce her responsibility for her actions.

He told Liverpool Crown Court that she had deliberately lied to GPs to obtain drugs and used "dishonesty and subterfuge" to increase the doses.

The judge said: "The tragic consequence was that he [Michael] was caused years of misery. He was reduced from a normal little boy ... to the pitiful state in which he was before his final admission to hospital.

"You did it deliberately. The personality disorder from which you are suffering does not remove your ability to make choices. You did choose to do all the dreadful things you did. I regard this sort of behaviour as absolutely at the top of the scale of cruelty to children."

Dickinson, from Seascale, Cumbria, was cleared of murder because doctors could not be certain that her actions in the ambulance led to Michael's death. Sentencing, Mr Justice Pitchers said that incident did not cause his death. "He was already doomed because of the state to which he'd been reduced," he said.