Rebecca Hogue: Mother’s conviction for boy’s murder under controversial ‘failure to protect’ law sparks anger

Rebecca Hogue will be sentenced in Cleveland County, Ohio, on Friday afternoon after being convicted under controversial ‘failure to protect’ law

Rebecca Hogue and her son Ryder pictured together before his death on New Year’s Day 2020 (Change.org)

Outrage has grown after a mother was convicted of her son’s murder despite prosecutors admitting that her boyfriend killed the toddler while she was out at work.

Rebecca Hogue is due to be sentenced in Cleveland County, Ohio, on Friday afternoon in a case that has drawn ire from women’s rights and domestic abuse groups.

Hogue, 29, was found guilty in November of the first-degree murder of her two-year-old son Ryder back on New Year’s Day 2020.

Prosecutors said that she returned in the early hours from a work shift at a bar to the home in Norman that she shared with her son and her boyfriend Christopher Trent.

She went to sleep, waking hours later to find her boyfriend gone. When Hogue went to check on her son, she found him unresponsive and cold.

Four days later, Trent’s body was found by police in the Wichita Mountains and his cause of death was ruled a suicide.

On a tree close to where his body was found, the words “Rebecca is innocent” were carved.

Investigators later determined that Trent had killed the little boy and that Hogue had not been present at the time of his death.

The lead detective in the case, Norman Police Detective Sean Judy, refused to file charges against the mother and was heard telling fellow officers in a leaked audio that he believed the case against her was “bulls***”.

However, the local district attorney’s office charged Hogue with first-degree murder through enabling child abuse anyway, under the state’s controversial “failure to protect” law.

Under the law, parents of child abuse victims can be charged with the same crime as the abuser for failing to protect the child from abuse when they knew or should have reasonably known about the abuse.

Hogue has maintained that she didn’t know her boyfriend was abusing her son.

She said she had noticed unexplained cuts and bruises on her son’s body in the weeks prior to his death but that Trent brushed them off as it being normal for boys to get “nicks and bruises”.

The court was shown photos of Ryder’s bruised body and heard how Hogue had searched online for the signs to spot a child is being abused.

Christopher Trent killed the boy before killing himself, according to investigators (Comanche County Sheriff’s Office)

Neither the detective’s comments nor the photos of the carving in the tree were allowed to be presented as evidence at trial.

A jury spent just two hours to find Hogue guilty and recommended she be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Investigators for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections have instead recommended that she does not serve any prison time but receives mental health treatment at a long-term residential facility, followed by a term of supervised probation.

The report, obtained by the Norman Transcript, describes Hogue as “remorseful” and “emotionally distraught” and said she “appears to be struggling mentally” and “going through grief”.

A Change.org petition to free Hogue had reached more than 25,000 signatures as of Friday morning.

Cleveland County District Judge Michael Tupper will sentence Hogue at 1:30pm local time on Friday.