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Utah mom gets maximum sentence for killing her six newborns

By Amy R. Connolly

PROVO, Utah, April 21 (UPI) -- A Utah mother who said she was helping her newborns by killing them was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison.

Megan Huntsman told the judge she gave birth to six babies -- four girls and two boys -- in the past decade and squeezed the life out of each one "to help them avoid the terrible life I would have given them."

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Huntsman said she was weighed down by a methamphetamine and alcohol addiction, an abusive marriage and overwhelming depression.

The infants' bodies were discovered last year by her estranged husband. He found them in a box in the garage.

"I honestly don't know what caused me to do these terrible things," Huntsman's attorney Anthony Howell said on her behalf.

Huntsman, 40, pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree felony murder. She told prosecutors a seventh child was stillborn. Prosecutors agreed to recommend that the sentences run concurrently, but the judge said it was "not appropriate." Instead she was ordered late Monday to serve three of the murder counts consecutively and the remaining concurrently.

"I really thought I'd seen it all until this case came along," the judge told Huntsman before sentencing. "I hoped I would not get the case. What a tragedy."

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