Vegan couple gets life for starving baby

ATLANTA -- A vegan couple whose malnourished 6-week-old son starved to death after they fed him a too-limited diet of soy milk and apple juice will have to serve their life sentences for murder, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

The court's unanimous decision rejected appeals by Jade Sanders and Lamont Thomas.

The two first-time parents, in their 20s at the time, lived in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. They rushed their infant, Crown Shakur, to the hospital in April 2004 after he began to have trouble breathing. Doctors couldn't resuscitate him and determined he died because of extreme malnourishment, or starvation.

Police searching the couple's apartment found a soy milk bottle, an apple juice bottle and a rancid-smelling baby bottle caked with debris.

At the 2007 trial, prosecutors said the soy milk cartons stated that it wasn't to be used as a substitute for baby formula. They contended that the couple intentionally neglected their child and refused to take him to the doctor even as his body wasted away. He was just 3.5 pounds when he died, about as much as a baby weighs at 7 months into a normal pregnancy.

A jury convicted them of malice murder, felony murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children.

"No matter how many times they want to say, 'We're vegans, we're vegetarians,' that's not the issue in this case," prosecutor Chuck Boring said during the trial. "The child died because he was not fed. Period."

Defense attorneys countered that the parents did the best they could while adhering to the lifestyle of vegans, who typically use no animal products. They said Sanders and Thomas did not realize the baby was in danger until they rushed his emaciated body to the hospital.

"I loved my son -- and I did not starve him," Jade Sanders said at her May 2007 sentencing hearing.